The Butcher of York Stage Christ’s Mortification
by Heather Chapman
The wagons track history through ice
We change behind a screen signifying hell light pin holes through the demon’s lips puckered to a vowel
My clothes are so soft it is early morning
I am easy I hand copy my lines onto pieces of paper I like mental sorts of rhymes how you can call on yourself like frost
We have props of vicious kinds great knives sharpened same way seasons friction against each other winter’s dark grinding teeth
It is the oldest trade it is the one that is intended
We take Christ in turns last year it was Joe then he lost his right forefinger Christ cannot be marred not by metal not by his own hand still he loves to chatter about his triumph true he’s convincing but it’s easier to play prey
In winter the meat is more tender it makes me feel like judgement though I know that is wrong
Next year maybe me not saying I want it though once Bill told me I suited the lamb drying his hands on his apron thumb stuck blood and crushed between teeth watching me make movements into an insides
God’s teeth painted gold
My craft teaches you things like to smile at yourself funny little body little wants makes me laugh sometimes to think of a red apple bitty tooth marks I’m not supposed to say it but the crowd loves our act best
Bill asks me where the mouth gets it call and mechanism I show him in red
I know people love me I think because of the hinges I make things for mouths not fierce or frugal I get work done
Delivered son blue eyes and animal stink
We stand at the back to watch the resurrection forehead all ill-like and glance to heaven crowd twitches forward he lives but what about the fields what about the lamb and I mean it like mercy
I mean it like eat
Goblin Shark
By Bex Hainsworth
A golden shovel after Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Living fossil, leviathan, grotesque, hell
fish, Eocene-perfected. Your snout is
a spade, not to dig a grave or empty
the depths of a trench, but to sniff and
search the sea-bed, hound, hag. All
abyssal creatures fear your net, the
slingshot of your jaws. Other devils
are not so strangely sluggish. You are
soft, pink: a lamp in the darkness here.
Teal Baby
by Ryan Mayer
The teal baby had her father’s eyes. (The teal baby’s father had the eyes of a crow.) The teal baby also had crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes, though she had only giggled once.
The teal baby once handed me a lily, which she had pulled from her little head. I held Teal Baby’s leathery hand. This lily’s petals glow through inky fog…
She faded.
I wrapped a sippy cup in a teal blanket. I buried that swaddled bauble in a caliginous corner out back. I placed the lily with luminous petals on her little mound; I saw a garden I knew had been barren for decades.
Chloe Elliott is our guest editor for issue 11.0 and 11.5. She is a winner of the 2022 New Poets Prize as well as the 2020 Creative Future Writers’ Award. Her writing features in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, bath magg, Bedtime Stories for the End of the World, Magma, The North and Strix, amongst others. Her pamphlet ‘Encyclopaedia’ is published with Smith|Doorstop, and her micro chapbook ‘Dreamsimulation’ is with The Braag. She is currently studying for an MPhil in History of Art at the University of Cambridge.
Heather Chapman is a Durham University student. She was a 2023 Foyles Young Poet, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Tower Poetry competition, the 2023 Wells Festival of Literature Young Poets prize, and the Shakespeare Schools Festival’s 2023 monologue competition. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Garlic Press and Bloodletter. She can be found on Instagram at @heatherchapman4523.
Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher from Bradford, West Yorkshire. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and has been shortlisted in the Welsh Poetry Competition, Waltham Forest Poetry Competition, and the AUB International Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The Rialto, Ink Sweat & Tears, Honest Ulsterman, and bath magg. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press.
Ryan Mayer is a poet and writer native to New Orleans, Louisiana. Ryan graduated Loyola University New Orleans with a BA in English (creative writing) and received his MFA from the University of New Orleans.