Issue Sixteen

Contents

Three poems

From What I Remember I snag out each fingernail, deflate my hand to a surgical glove, roll my arms to the elbows like there’s work to be done. I am, it turns out, a reluctant ghost. I am leaving … Read article

Carstairs’ Homer

‘You might try something about the sea?’ said Carstairs, although I wasn’t really listening. ‘What's that about the sea?’ ‘You know, how it... looks in this light,’ he clenched his… Read article

Cat People

June, 2010. South Africa vibrates with football fever.‘Feel it, it is here’ goes the slogan. South African flags adorn cars across the city, flying from antennae and covering wing mirrors. If you … Read article

Two Poems

Riding to Ronda What can be remembered, what made up— The unsure eye slips this to that in landscape past the bus-glass. Trees stream into olive ceiling / sky flipped into ground. A pond… Read article

Dragons’ Veins

‘Your old house was haunted,’ my girlfriend said to me. She had sensed it whenever she had passed the place, before she knew I had ever lived there. It was a curious hybrid, a rustic townhouse tha… Read article

Bee

  March After all of our readying and careful preparation, the hive sits outside with a What Now? feeling about it, an unnaturally bright near-tangerine beside all of the stripped-down grey… Read article

St Francis Bay

In the afternoon our house settles into a decadent air. My sisters’ children are asleep, there is the lingering smell of coffee, the corridors are in shade with leaves moving silently outside the wi… Read article

Syria in Exile

Over Eid al-Adha in September 2015 the Turkish-Syrian border opened to allow around 50,000 Syrians to cross to spend the holiday with their families. It had been closed for nine months. Some travelled… Read article