Creative Writing, Poetry, Prose

Love Says

by Monim Wains Love has a thousand shades from the mellowest yellow to the deepest red. It paints the grey wrinkles of a face onto a canvas, traced with lolling eyes and a lazy smile. Love. Passion and heat, calm warmth, drowning emotion and friendship. Inside jokes and a decade of moments, threads of memories […]

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Poetry

Get Over It

by Tom Saer She said I should process my feelings before destroying other eyes To the point that they laugh I tried to say I wasn’t less-than-one-week-old love leftovers But maybe that wasn’t so convincing There are tears in my ear still Soft salt in the morning at least They came I think from Orphean […]

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Poetry

‘Language Acquisition (1 Corinthians 13)’

by Joel Fraser These couplets clang as cymbals These gongs resound their rhythms We crash in tearful frustration For all of our creation Amounts to no more than this: A lip-locked struggle for air And words. Must we choose? Tongues of men and angels, we can master But I know that they are jars of […]

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Poetry

‘Washing Cycles’

The rhythmic hum of the washing machine reminds me that not all metronomes are perfect and that water smells like flowers sometimes and that sometimes it smells like mud and that you are still in the room. You sent me teardrops in damp envelopes and poems you didn’t write. And I realised your voice doesn’t […]

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Poetry

‘a threesome’

by Fanxi Liu THE DIFFICULTY OF DISENTANGLEMENT Girl holding your hand. I dreamt of empty dormitories last night very quietly, Henan summer blowing in through the open door. There was a drought that year, three reservoirs drawn dry, despite which the evening air was sharp enough to cut my thoughts in half: upturned faces touched […]

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Poetry

‘Transmission’

by Max Clements As our eyes touch, my mind elapses. Your intimate complexion is pallid, your radiance extinguished. Your expression is lifeless. Your hands are frigid, your fingers callous. You possessed me. Your departed vitality lay dormant within me; and yet it drained mine. I devoured your beauty; I touched and tasted yet attained no […]

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Poetry

‘Train Station Tear Tracks – On Trauma’

by Aaron Cawood Lights up. The bench at the train station; we sit. Only, now, in Act Two, I smile, In spite of the crowd – I feed the first line. And because you are there, I smile throughout the Act. As, because you are there, sirens pass in quiet. And, because you are there, […]

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Poetry

Upon Waking

by Miriam Stegmann The gravity of an ending In the fleeing dark Anthracite clouds of breath Hanging low Over the curve of your heavy skull Your globe, world of worlds Allegory of bones, blood, brain Your thoughts A black box Weighing me down. In foreboding shadows you rest Below my collar bone Pressing onto my […]

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Culture, Prose, Reviews

Ophir Productions presents The Effect – a review

by Jacob Warn It is a play that broaches broad and pertinent questions. It is a dramatic presentation of the debates that take place as we increasingly attempt to reconcile a global mental health epidemic with a tendency to extreme, pharmaceutical medicalisation. It asks persistently, what is love? At other times, is asks, what is […]

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