Category: Webzine

Emily Munro

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1.

toy guns
one looked like a bird
I didn’t bother to fold the clothes

2.

the plastic bag
given by my mother
apples: cooking below, eating on top
and slices of dry bread

3.

which of it was mine
my children’s
my husband’s?

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Emily Munro is a writer, archive curator and filmmaker based in Glasgow. Her writing explores themes around the environment, anxiety and parenting as well as our ambivalent relationship to the past in the Anthropocene. She was longlisted for the 2023 Caledonia Novel Award and the 2022 Briefly Write Poetry Prize.

Mark Valentine

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On the way to the old alabaster works,
on a hot day, the river brown and slow,
buzzards above the hill, the air still,
we came upon the overgrown mosaic
made by local children years ago,
a picture-book plan of their world:
cars, ponies, trains, church, school,
mostly succumbing to the red mud,
the bright tiles cracked or chipped;
an abandoned tableau, zest now lost,
its artists grown up and gone away,
streets haunted by dandelion ghosts.

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Mark Valentine lives in Yorkshire and likes second-hand bookshops, vegan food, canal walks, small towns, and village hall flea markets. His work has appeared in PN Review, Agenda, M58, Finished Creatures, Raceme, Volume, Atrium and in a chapbook, Astarology (Salo Press, 2021).

Chloe McIntosh

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Anyway,
Sorry for the teeth at your collarbone,
The venom in your throat,
The way you never got to the centre of me
No matter how far you burrowed
And how much I promised it was right around that bend

The things we are to each other
Are nebulous and weak
As the tea your flatmate leaves
Scattered on every surface of the house

I just wanted you to take a chance, give a little,
Believe in something crueller and more wondrous than what you’d come to expect
But all we got was the shed skin, the tetanus, cold mugs, heating bills we can’t afford,
Ghosts of each other
Ripped out of every photograph

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Chloe McIntosh is a poet and writer of short fiction from Hertfordshire. She has a BA in English Literature from the University of Exeter and was shortlisted for the Platypus Press Celestial Bodies Poetry Competition. Her work is also forthcoming in Lucent Dreaming’s For a Friend Anthology.

Vyacheslav Konoval

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A battalion is born
from former police officers,
wear a chevron
take the patch and medallion.

Training ahead
blood, sweat and loss,
shame, I’m in a warm bed.

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Vyacheslav Konoval is a Ukrainian poet whose work is devoted to the most pressing social problems of our time, such as poverty, ecology, relations between the people and the government, and war. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Anarchy Anthology Archive, International Poetry Anthology and Literary Waves Publishing.

Namratha Varadharajan

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I scroll through the new world
and there is a face  

that reminds me of a closed door.
The promise of everything

that flew away, the hidden ocean
of (possible) emotions. Everything

away from sight. The
we was never a we, and the

(never we) became an I, I
should have stuck

my face inside the wet earth, I
should have (again and again)

dived off ledges and fell into tears. Instead
in the now. nothing.

which makes me think there was nothing then.

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Namratha Varadharajan writes to explore human emotions and relationships, and our interconnectedness with nature while trying to chip at the prejudices that plague us, one syllable at a time. Her work has been published in The Yearbook of Indian Poetry 2022, The Kali Project, The Gulmohar Quarterly, The Alipore Post, haikuKATHA, Poetry Pea, among others.