1989
by Louise Machen
It was the year we trafficked frogspawn
from the pond beside the bookies.
We were mirrors of each other:
Clockhouse labels, Opal Fruits,
laburnum flowers in our hair,
garden-hopping with our spoils stashed in a cracked fish tank.
And there they sat.
Watching us from behind the shed window
in their crystalline jam, turning.
Some began to bud
until spring warmed up
and they were cooked in the sunlight.
Mulch
by Nathaniel Spain
Neighbourhood kids started calling it Mulch. Its eyes were eggshells. Its great, bowed back was a mound of grass-clippings from the vast lawn of 12 Royal Avenue. Its mouth was the smiling curve of a shredded bicycle innertube. Its fingers were chicken-bones, one arm the bough of a grand old tree felled because its roots kept pushing up summer-softened tarmac. Small orange funguses peppered it like moles.
What about its organs? Well, its brain was a rotten cauliflower head. Its stomach was the dustbag of a Henry Hoover. Its liver was a glass bottle filled with moss. Its left lung was a slice of malted bloomer, sickly-green with mould. Its right lung was a crinkled crisp packet.
Mulch would shuffle through the back yards and gardens in the small hours. It would ease over the dividing brick walls slug-like, dropping down each time with a rumble and a rustle like a heavy duvet. Orange street-lights glimmered off its damp body, as big as an armchair – and getting bigger. It would scoop wet cardboard from cracked recycling bins. It would filter through the detritus of drains like a whale sifting krill, finding the choicest pieces with which to gather mass.
It was well-meaning, or at least it did not seem to wish ill. Its intent was inscrutable; its trajectory unchartable. At three in the morning a teenager would leave an offering of waste – carrot heads, fish-bones, potato-peelings – and make a compact. I give you this offering, and in return… Give me good fortune. Find our lost cat. Please let me pass my GCSEs. Take the nightmares away.
More often than not, Mulch would accept. A fifty-pound note under a plant-pot. A fearful-looking cat long thought dead, pawing at the door. A night in which the child dreamt only of deep, dark places filled with the tang of rich and rotting loam, speaking of a world both profoundly real and utterly false.
Day 40
by Andrea Small
It’s longer for me, of course, ever cautious
I locked myself down early
stopped cutting back the briar
let my hair grow
let dustdrifts gather in the corners of this echoing hall
the mice like it
I haven’t swept the grate for years
when the cinders stifled any fresh flame
I set fires on the tiled floor
let smoke cloud the high ceilings
it is dark most of the time
the owls like it
the apple tree has grown through the gallery window
I eat its fruit sparingly
the pump in the kitchen is still working
every day I draw water
to fill the bowls around the edge of the hall
the finches like it
I used to sing but the mice prefer the silence
the high notes burst their hearts
the owls liked that
forty, fifty, five hundred
numbers count for nothing now
Louise Machen is a Mancunian poet and a graduate of The Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester. Her poetry likes to explore relationships through the use of narrative and visual detail and has appeared in Agenda and Black and Blue.
Nathaniel Spain is a writer and artist based in Gateshead. He has previously been published in The Fiction Pool and the The Thorn Journal, and works for Inpress and The Poetry Book Society. Born in Cambridgeshire, Nathaniel has lived in the North of England since studying at Lancaster University. His work can be found at www.nathanielspain.co.uk.
Andrea Small lives in Sheffield. She is a member of Heeley Women Writers and has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Manchester Metropolitan University. She runs singing groups for all sorts of people, believing that we all can – and should – sing. Her poetry has been published in Dream Catcher, Strix and Ink Sweat and Tears. Competition success includes a commendation in the 2020 Yaffle Prize and second place in the 2021 Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition.