To celebrate our 10-year anniversary, this December we are publishing a special commemorative issue featuring our most popular contributors since 2016. Each contributor will discuss what Dodging th…

My Mother’s Fear My mother’s fear, always at a simmer, is holy. I feel her uneven breath from fifty feet away, her panicked whisper trembles the earth. Holy is my mother, who threatens me with her mother’s promise that she will be raped on the train if she falls asleep. I worry my mother on the streets of Philadelphia at night; it excites me.

An Undistinguished Biography I read in 1846 the Choctaw Nationsent $273 to another small nation, Ireland,when the potato crop failed; people dyingon the docks, arms outstretched. I try to not to skip the antecedentsat the beginning of a memoir, so and somarried someone beneath them,wore a tall hat and whiskers, made treatiesand ruled India; it’s strange how people turn out.

Dance The violinist weaves a melody with fluid fingers. A woman in the first row raises her arms and draws shapes in the air, limbs swaying in melodic breeze. She dances, shouts with abandon, exclaims her delight. The tutti returns: energy and excitement rise from the orchestra, roll across the stage, cascade into the audience and crest at her seat. She whoops.

The Fruited Plain For Rumeysa Ozturk She’d heard that our country was the fruited plain of freedom, a place of streets, not paved with gold, but with friendship, with care, with that Yankee Doodle optimism, that get- up-and-go. She felt privileged to be here, privileged to attend such a prestigious university where she learned about free speech, how it was protected…

Microdosing I’d been microdosing grief for yearsbefore you died, starting with the dayyou cried off walking to the ice houseon Slieve Donard. You began to shy awayfrom coming down the pub to watch United.Then all those little trips to Daisy Hill,the slow erosion of your smile and will. My tolerance had grown sky-high, leaving me…

Town in Dark Trousersthe town leaps about in dark trousers a childhood traipses through / many shopsliqour stores green grocers / the condom people / making love in The SquareThe Lipstick Lady i take notice pay the lipstick lady for her war paint her smudged facei feel the tugof being pulled up new sap in the veins…

Dents de Lion But if I could shuck openmy skull and empty itmake a singing bowl of bone with my fingertipsthen I would hear my daughterundressing in the field and if time were a cup of aspicI’d rub up against those meaty daystaste her unironed facestoop in my mute snow tracksfeel sweat in my eyes…

Abigail Ottley writes poetry, short fiction, and memoir. In 2024, she placed second in the International Plaza Prose Poem Competition (with ‘A survivor dreams…’) and won the Wildfire 150 Flash Award for the second year running. Commended in the Welshpool, Dark Poets, and What We Inherit From Water, she placed third in the International Patricia Eschen Poetry Prize (2024), going on to win the Metro Poetry Competition re the theme of care.

Protection One sets an alarm. Another leaves all the lights on. A third just lets a blaring radio convince a prospective burglar that there’s somebody home. The fourth would set a man-trap if he could but, instead, gives the freedom of his apartment to his savage pit-bull. All head out on a Saturday night, hunker down in some temporary establishment,

Fridge Milk Valuable things are so easily broken — you learnt that when the water still held our secrets. When the moon was close enough to smell beach salt and vanilla hands. The night was fridge milk, our bodies constellations. The Harvest On the day Sandy buried her pups they were harvesting maize from the fields. She chose a spot behind the compost heap…

The Madman and the Bus We order spaghetti, you with mushrooms, me, racy with olives and garlic, in a little spa nestled in the Black Forest. On a bench across from us, a madman raves as he waits for the bus. “He’ll stop,” you say, grating Parmesan, “when it arrives.” “I know the mad,” I answer, sipping wine. “My father was mad—

In the Playground How high did that swing go up past the brambles of your mind, that mess Was your heart as bare as those trees Did the leaves fall heavy, like my footsteps crushing the life out of autumn What brought the winter, Daddy When did you decide my three feet worth of innocence wasn't good enough Why did you let go of my hands…

This December. Watch this space.

Sacred Duty After Giraldus Cambrensis I was sucking your dick and I’m sorry I was thinking about herons the ones down in North Strand staring straight down into the water watching plastic wrappers float by bicycle wheels as if they were some new kind of colourful fish the poppies and oxeye daisies bowing their heads as the wind whistles through the crumbling railway buildings…

Pakistan The gravediggersplanting bodieslike bulbsfor springlinger undera wolf moontheir mindscallused as their handsagainst the grim work The interment of128 girls murderedtheir school turned intoa penny arcadeby terroriststheir screams caughtin the cracks and crevassesof blood-spatteredbullet-riddled walls One more devastationin service of adamned ideology.

Just Sitting The afternoon an empty box, stretchingand scrumptious, dangling freedoms. Jettison that doer, the haver-to-beon time, here, there, as expectedis the whisper of it. The green grass here needsno tending, each blade exercisesits very own right to life, liberty. And this box might grow with everyun-ticked second until light fadesand sharply reveals that childhood treat…

Highway 56 First it looked like a wrapper rippling across the asphalt, then it rose on front paws pulling broken hind parts out of the westbound lane. My God, I thought. A mile later I turned back, but the possum was gone. In its place the wind, blowing into the waving shoulder grass. Brian Builta lives in Arlington, Texas, and works at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth.

Milano Cortina, 2026 I must be getting oldbecause Winter Olympianslook like tiny neon childrenand their leaps from high ledgesmake me nervous. It’s too late to learn how to skate backwards on one leg and I have this weird urgeto feed hot soup to a cold adrenaline junkie. I admit it:these days having funfeels like shattering my femur…

My Grandfather’s Hands As a child I was told the cruel history: how he poured hot soup over my grandmother’s head, chained his sons in the garage to a coal stove, made them go without food, would not allow children to speak at the table, slapped them across the head if they did. The day his youngest son was born…

Leaky Hearts Julia Kristeva says the female body is leaky and uncontainedmy doctor says my heart is leaky tooregurgitating to be exact Invoking exactly what Kristeva points tosomething disgusting about the female body leakyregurgitatinguncontainedbloodlove The latter I would argue is a giftlove should at least leak outif you are not willing or able to let it pour…

APOLOGY TRIPTYCH I'm sorry you thought I was flirtingwith that girl on the dance floorand leaving you outdemoting you from number oneof course you’re my number oneand isn't that what dance is all about—the cock and hen shuffle game—the trouble is normally girls leave me well alonebut they see you've tested and kept me…

Zeus Came Down He took me while hunting a strange turn of events a shadow, I thought, a branch broken off a tree falling at me only to be lifted up body and all in a tender touching of talons— my own cornered game frozen below arrows released un-aimed twisting around, the air disturbed by wings’ gorgeous displays putting the sun to shame, quivering…

Kyiv Summer July 2022 The guy with donations for Irpin is late.We wait in the shade by the roasting carand observe the sun-cracked playground. A dusty slide and swings, a rocket-shapedclimbing frame glints and flakes. The scrapof no-entry tape left behind from Covid. No kids. Occasional women hail friendsfor a slow recalibration. The whydid you stay here in March?

BLUE SWEATER I make the mistake of asking my motherwhere she got that pretty blue sweater. I don’t remember, she says and shrugs in apology.I try to follow the rules for talking to people with Alzheimer’s—to avoid asking the kindsof questions that depend on memory, to resist the urge to correct her when she believes,for instance, that we are in a restaurant…

Trickster Gods Play Games with a Fourteen-Year-Old Girl The school trip form saysfifty-five dollars. Yesterdayit didn’t mention money.She cannot grab the paperfrom her father without riskingthe backhand she will getanyway because of the cost. She skips breakfast daily,her stomach a bull-necked bouncerrefusing entry to anythingbefore eleven, on pain of acid vomit.

January Inside the diner, fluorescent lightsglare down on us,their faulty buzzing audiblesince the jukeboxes are fake.The patched up vinyl boothaches under every movement. Before I can wonderwhy it looks so familiar, you askif I’m going to get the pancakes againbecause that’s what I did when we were nineteen. Finger traces lines through spilled table salt…

SAD Like wet fog creeping in, like a foghorn’sexpiring wail, repeating repeating, like skydeprived of a single chink of light, wide sweepof solitary grey. Sad like furniture left out foranyone to take away, an old sofa covered instretchy tan crepe soaked to its spongey insides.Sad like late Sundays, dark-morning Mondayswhen you heave aside the dead weight of Not…

Missing Father This morning being too wintryfor a walk, I think of my father,trudging to the bus stop at dawn in allweathers, to juggle numbers on paperacross the George Washington Bridge. My twin sister and Iwould toddle to the front door,our pajamas hanging on uslike wilted petunias, snortingback our tears, wailing,Where’s Daddy?

Elsa Peretti Cuff This isn’t a gift but a bribe, An inducement to—please— Keep out of my head (At least while I sleep) So instead of contriving to trick My hippocampus Into finding your lips In my slack cotton sheets I can just close my eyes, Impervious to Time’s dispassionate tick Till I next touch your cheek. Jason Schwartz is a crypto tax lawyer. His work has appeared in Toasted Cheese. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and daughter.

Be Done I have never learned to knit, so trying to get the stitches of my will and Thy will all lined up in neat rows to form my life jacket has been my greatest blundering making it apparent for anyone who looks at me to see I have no opening to let out the fullness of my second arm, so I just look idle…

stripped of our wholeness, we feel no grief You brought yourself in handfulsto me. Your pieces splayed across our bedlike scraps of cloth. I marveled at the aggregatescattered there, all of you offered upin soft, folded stars. I gathered you up; love, gathered with fistscallused and weary with wanting. I held you,all of you flat against me, stitched you there,

Wintergone Wind & spitting rain washed away the last of this week’s winter. I am twisted up into white sheets feeling emptied under drifts, homeless, discarded face down, curled up in an oak’s last snow. There’s shame having clean, full, warm, safe, but no voice speaking. Even an empty pitcher holds utility, a promise to carry & serve & give.

The Etymology of Loneliness Snow is falling sideways. Given the title, one might assume I’m in crisis, identifying with the weather as a cry for help. That I have a disorder of loneliness and I’m spiraling downward like the snow. But the snow is gorgeous, born of unhuman hands, its sudden arrival a white mirage. Now a single black fly on the liminal windowpane.

Christmas Tree Scarring the neighbors’ son wanted to hang himself but couldn’t no one taught him how so only a bulbless lamp swings every evening from the ceiling death’s afraid to enter the apartment christmas tree scars sprouting in shadow Mykyta Ryzhykh has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and published widely, including in journals such as The Tiger Moth Review, Monterey Poetry Review, and The Moth.

Dead Letter So, that’s done, dusted for another year. Another snowless, so-called holy day devoid of joy, festivity, or light, packed away, without ceremony. Like yours, my high-arched foot arthritic, cramps, and I resent the stamps I can’t afford, bemoan the hats I’ve lost, file photos old, fold messages in pie crusts, unforward. Address unknown. No suitcase filled with dead…

Our Christmas Turkey was a nine-pounderfrom Grandad Mick in Longford,whose right leg was severedin a motorcycle crash. Plucked from the backof the green post van,its box wrapped in a skinof brown paper tied with string—his yearly gift heralded Christmas. Propped up by prosthesis,he leaned on his cane and hobbledall the way to the post office…

This is the place We stopped, somewhere in time, looked around, the country bizarre, the landscape mutating, the muted people making signs in our direction. Night came and even the gestures receded, the voices hid behind doors; our senses, we saved for our own use, huddled together as often as we breathed. Life seemed fixed by then – it would…

Writers need journals to accept their work to generate momentum. Here are eight steps to take when submitting your writing for publication. 1: Research opportunities Start by researching which publ…

Nothing Compares to a Real Holiday (After TUI’s ‘Nothing compares to a real holiday,’ 2020) The snow has lain three days the street is frozen roofs luminous in a pre-dawn light sky already faded from deep, star-sprinkled black to this stern uncompromising blue I have a poem to write something about overheard conversations or advertising slogans But my imagination is no match…

Sonnet for Jack Spicer Your head looks like a half-eaten bowl Of chili, warm and soothing to eat. How it must feel to be picked apart By a life that left you for dead. Your nudity may be a hymn Should the rhinestones and geese Get their act together. Dead or not There’s little left. Our kitchen is a carnival…

The Moon Before Yule I rise, bringing the gift of natural light to the city. High above the chimney pots, department stores and roads, I turn my gaze upon them. I observe their preparations, despair that they name this ritual harm ‘festivities.’ My eyes smart from the twinkling of a billion light bulbs, big and small, that adorn buildings, facsimiles of trees, and something they call Christmas jumpers.

Silence Evening sun folds shadows into frozen ground. Expressionless crowds remind me of my father, his silvered hair always ending in silence. There are words I remember with blood and water inside. In the silence under clouds there is winter and promised winds blowing through forests. Evening answers with rain or darkness. His eye half-opened, a half-moon of lingering sounds that look away…

Relics Box The day after my Grandma Sandra died in December 1985, I saw INXS at the Agora Ballroom with a few friends. (I don’t remember their names.) Mom told me to go & enjoy myself. Thank God I already put the Christmas tree up—this is the last one I will ever trim. I ignored this declaration because this was always her favorite holiday.

I SWEAR, I WASN’T THAT SAD The bee sting you got running barefoot one summer through a meadow so green it hummed, so wide it must have thought it was forever. That sting now rings the church bells, plays the organ softly before Sunday sermon. It trims the shrubs out front, paints the fence white as a hymn, rinses the windows…

responsible clinician i never say hello to anyone i have no time for politetudes as far as i can see that's all nonsense i just ignore patients who greet me on the wards if the nurses or godforbid someone’s lawyer emails me, i have a stock response it says, please do not email me at this address i manage and treat, amongst other people, psychopaths.

a falling leaf a leaf fallsin gold, dancesto the earth,crisp, clasps nothing.breeze tender,barbets singgoodbye. grateful to the lightwhich kept her alivethat she may nurture;crush her waythrough the mundane.to give, what a wayto die.   Kamakshi Lekshmanan holds an MA in Wild Writing from the University of Essex. Her memories became…