Issue 37 | March 2019 |

The puppy squirms in Janine’s muscular arms as she rings the bell, but its squirming is eager, its energy indistinguishable from delight — delight…

    The Burden – The Gardener by Rudyard Kipling. By Mike Smith Several critics of Kipling mention this story. It comes in the 1926 Debits and Credits…

Nigel Jarrett is a former newspaperman and a double prizewinner as a fiction writer: the Rhys Davies Award for short fiction and, in 2016, the…

My hands are wet. I washed them before I left the house but didn’t dry them, the towel in the bathroom already used to…

Yet another pretentious arsehole spouting off about aesthetic theories. What is he looking for? To see how long he can shitetalk before sand falls…

Carla Scarano D’Antonio moved to England (Lancashire then Surrey) in 2007 from Rome (Italy) and started attending creative writing courses. She obtained a Degree…

The life of war correspondent Marie Colvin, by Lindsey Hilsum.

BREAKWATER                Dusted by sand, fanned by spring breezes, she lies in her shingle bed. She and her lover, dreamed through yesterday: held real life…

QUEENS OF THE MAY Mayday. White afternoon light in the white mouth of the year. Follow a blue thread of sound to the braid of girls in their convent-school…

What’s False About Cracked Teeth? There are words I will not write here, and not the ones already locked up in lizard skin. No lock or clasp…

Textroots. (5 poems) Text/isle roots Tree flow she knows no end in the wind and dirt and poison she breath, no breeze no delicate hope, no…

‘I don’t want to go out, you know,’ Louise said as she ran the straighteners through her long blonde hair. Siobhan didn’t answer her. Instead…

  Someone recently asked me why I decided to run a monthly writers’ coaching clinic. After all, I co-facilitate a weekly writers’ forum, so was…

Remembrance is a form of honour. We remember because we love.  The more we cherish a memory, the stronger it becomes. Last year I washed…

The return of the artist It was that kind of a once-in-a-lifetime snow and hailstones day so dreamed of by smug artists and Yale dons, dendrological in a…

Hill of Moses That argument about the Brontës, I am thinking of it again – of Emily, I mean, the unremarkable virgin – I am thinking of her out…

Biography: Frances Browner grew up in Dublin, spent twenty years in New York and now resides in County Wicklow. She has been writing fiction…