Norman Street
By Louise Machen
Pears soap lives on the sink in the downstairs loo
where spiders become squatters if you don’t replace the plug.
They come up the drains you’d say, as though I should have known.
The smell of that soap is corporation pop, small fish lightly battered,
roller boots on the uneven path, green coat, red hat,
where washing hangs on doors and cake is without custard.
It’s where I’d stay when mum was on an errand choosing to sit
on the pouffe (a pull on the seam). I’d read, you’d listen.
Although my memory thickens, I can still see the view from the box room.
We’d get twist cones from the ice-cream man with your pension
and eat them in the kitchen where, later, I cut your hair,
fine like feathers, and you stroked my hands with translucent skin.
Don’t tell me under the white sun
By Liv Aldridge
this orange is peeling
like a spectral helicopter
your
ginger tufts
are made distant by the sea
out of the liquid you rise
I, mould your hands
with ease, they come cleaving from the wedge like
automated birth.
Wo[e]man
By Cate Carlowe
I see the man [blue-pink-orange sunset] my man comes
back home to quiet catastrophe; this world has retro allegiance
to dinosaur arctics; mass extinctions update man’s homeostasis;
giggle machines add in ready to his rust risings [glinting at dawn];
electrical champ pylons hum [erosion mandrakes off my clothes] to
veggie my smooth [the news is at war] it’s a hot thing and I see my man
logout from the breathing panel and he exits from his red-sky blues.
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.
Cate Carlowe is a postgraduate at Durham University. She has previously been published in student journals, poetry competitions, literary collections and The Times. Her main themes of interest are technology, pollution, climate change and horror.
Liv Aldridge moved to Durham from Sweden to pursue a degree in English Literature about a year ago. She is looking forward to spending at least the next two years of her life in the North.