Issue 04 Online Library

Here you can read work from our Issue 04 Featured Writers.

Ofelia ferch Rhos
She/Her

A Poem for Voices

I

You are the last.
You are the last cigarette
that rattles listlessly around the box.
You are the last fading melody
on an album before the needle is doomed
to skip around blank space for an eternity.
You are the last straw and I am the first
and we break the camel just as much.
You are the last second in the day
before the longer hand skulks into morning
and I am the first second that is kept
immovably from you,
because you are the closeness of dusk and dawn
and I am the day that separates them.
You are the last line of the poem
and I am the first.

II

You are the first.
You are the first green shoots of spring
that worm through the undergrowth like maggots
and feed off the dying winter.
You are the first song the bird makes in the morning.
You are the blues and violets of the flowers
and I am green and sick.
You are the pricks of dawn through the curtains
and I am the last light forced over the horizon
like a sword buried deep, deep into a stone.
I am a drowning photograph in a darkroom
and you are standing over a lake
where kicked-up grit makes the water opaque
and you can’t pick out the reflection
and you don’t want to pick out the reflection,
which like a thrashing mackerel on a line
comes reeling out the water
with its gormless eyes cocked to heaven
and its tiger-dappled back craning
like its spine is the arching fishing rod;
I am the reflection under the lake
and you are the first but I am your last.

IG: @ferch_writes

Alexander Cowey
He/Him

The fox and the ferris wheel:

You come to the abandoned fairground a lot. Almost everyday, almost as much as I do. You don’t see me but I’ve seen you. You are always alone climbing the ferris wheel, holding onto the bars like a climbing frame. The wind flying through your hair as you close your eyes and embrace the sun glowing on your skin. The fallen fair invaded by ivy and wild flowers is now your own personal playground.

I watch from my hiding place behind a tree or old popcorn stand or a toppled over bin. It’s been like that since I’ve been here. Since I’ve been alive, probably since you’ve been alive too. I’ve asked the others what they know about the fairground and perhaps you’ve asked the people you know too. You might have heard stories about the place. How it used to be filled with life. Children running through the crowds dizzy on sugar, young couples shyly trying to steal glances, local people trying to sell patrons food, drink, or convince them to play cheap games. The festivals this place must have seen.

Maybe your parents met here like mine did or maybe they almost met, missing each other by a second only to meet again years later. Maybe this was where they had their first date, waiting for the sun to set and colour the skies pink. Did they tell you? Or have they kept it to themselves? A secret for them.

Are these things on your mind while you enjoy the sun? You seem content and warm. I crave the same warmth as I step forward, paws rustling the grass and making prints in the mud. I tread delicately so you don’t notice, so I don’t disturb your bliss, so you don’t react with malice. Humans sometimes can’t help themselves when they see the orange of my fur.

But you do notice the noise behind you. Your head whips around before I can hide or escape. You see me, your brown eyes wide. We stare at each other in the fairground, overgrown, two worlds colliding.

IG: @kllogram TikTok: @kayartbants

Ash Alexander
He/Him

Epiphany

Perhaps,
instead of digging doggedly in the sickly soil,
black detritus clinging,
fingers raw and aching,
scrabbling to pull up and chew upon the anaemic roots of this stunted tree,

I might instead
hop gaily
between the striving branches,
like a bright, cackling bird.

IG: @kn1ghtofcups Web: ashalexander.carrd.co

Sophie Glickman
She/Her

Lavender

Lesbians have always been lavender. But we’ve never been a scare or a menace.

Like lavender, we want to grow, to thrive, to be seen. You can hold us and bring us close. Enjoy our sweetness and take in our beauty. And we stay year after year, no matter who or what tries to cut us down. Despite all your attempts to prune us, still we flourish.

And together, in all our hues and sizes, we stand strong and united; a constant in the world.

But lesbians are not plants; we are human. We deserve respect, empowerment and dignity. And when these things are ripped from our roots, when we’re forced to hide in the shade or planted in harsh terrain, we will not wither like lavender. We will bloom in defiance, our sweetest that you once enjoyed, becoming bitter.

We will become the menace you created.

IG: @sophieglick321

Anjem Anwar
He/Him

Colonial Shackles

The colour of my skin pleases my mother; she takes pride in it, as if it were an achievement. It is the colour of pale tea laden with milk that would set sommeliers aghast. I’m to hide from the sun for fear it will taint my skin like a stain on a white carpet.

Yet, during the summer, I rebel and lie under the warmth of the beating sun as I let the prose of writers wash over me. A tan is my biggest shame and, in turn, my mother’s (a vestige of colonialism).

My defiance cannot go unpunished. My mother holds me hostage as she aggressively rubs gram flour mixed with lemon juice and milk over my face. My skin colour is my trophy; it must be polished and restored to its previous glory.

She tells me about my cousin, who rubs ‘Fair and Lovely’ over her supple skin. The colour of her skin pleases me: a warm, dusky brown. My cousin is to be married soon, yet biodata on matchmaking sites states that only someone fair is worthy of love.

My aunt chimes in and tells me about her son, who wears sheer lenghas that don’t cover his midriff, and how he dances until the moon and the sun bid each other farewell at first light. She tells me about his love of makeup, decadence, and opulent jewellery that twinkles with sin. That he does not meet gender norms and masculinity is a dying art form.

His freedom of expression excites me, and his dancing brings me joy in this forever conservative world. It reminds me of an era forgotten, when the women of Heramandi ruled Hindustan, luring wayward men to their palatial estates, teaching them etiquette, the art of love, and how they lived like queens. I close my eyes and hear the laughter of drag queens as they dance and tease locals at parties, their hips swaying seductively as their bodies shimmer with beads of sweat and glitter.

I inform them that these thoughts are ghostly echoes from our colonial past. That our history was vibrant and gender was fluid, we lived in blissful liberty until the British colonised us and introduced Victorian morality tainted with hypocrisy. They burnt down institutions, questioned our way of life and championed their postiche superiority.

Our worth no longer depends on the colour of our skin nor on the shape of the vessels that carry and anchor us through life. We should place no value on outdated Victorian morals that have no place in contemporary society.

They shake their heads in disagreement.

I hold my tongue to keep the peace, for it is not strong enough to break the colonial shackles that bind them.

IG: @amare_liber

Norman Dearlove-Scott
He/Him

I know how I am (do you?)

Do you see that little box over there
That’s what you like to put me in
I don’t fit in easily
I must be contorted and squeezed inside
But at least it makes you feel comfortable
I can’t be roaming around like a free-range chicken
Box me up and label me, that’s what you want
I’ve come realise that I am only brought out on special occasions
Practically ornamental
The token friend you can take to very specific events
Then everyone can say, ‘hey, look at you, you’re so inclusive, so open minded’
Until the box is ready to be closed again
You’re not ready for the real conversation
You just can’t handle the truth
My pain is the same as your pain
Except the only pain you know is champagne
Bubbles dancing on your tongue tip
Never needing to watch your back or be careful of what you say
I quite like my little box to be fair
Naturally it’s impeccably furnished
But at least it’s mine, and I know who I am

IG: @normandearlovepoetry

Maddy Kilsby-McMurray
They/Them

It’s just a phase

It’s just a phase, he spits at me,
Anger and torment in his gaze.
You’ll grow out of it, get past it,
Become a little more like me.

I was too young then to know,
How stupid that statement was,
How ridiculous and redundant,
Because isn’t that all that life is?

The moon, she doesn’t apologise,
Doesn’t bow and hide and cower,
Every month she turns and piroettes,
Posing in eight different forms.

The daffodil buds that bloom in Spring
Year after year, bursting free of soil,
Care not a bit if it’s just a phase,
They’re going to grow anyways.

Children will grow into their shoes,
Dogs will have their colour kissed away,
Rain will fall and thunder rumble,
The sun will shine on brighter days.

Jobs, work, careers will change,
Partners will swap into the dance,
Some will stay, some will go,
But wasn’t it all worth the chance?

I guess, in one way, he was right.
It was a phase, my baby gay days.
I’m queerer now than ever before,
My gender spunked up the wall.

And in my next phase, I’m sure,
I’ll be greyer, stiffer, older too,
But just as queer, if not more.
Some phases last forevermore.

IG: @trashfirepoet

Pax Butchart
They/Xe

Malmesbury

There are daisies growing
At the foot of the half-ruined abbey
As I chant in Anglish
And howl the wind’s name
In my cracking choirboy’s voice
Under the coppering beech
On Æthelstan’s hill.
The land
Remembers,
Older than time, the footprints pressed
Into its tender grassy flesh.
Hamish
Is lolling, dark curls tossed by the air,
Like the single bunch of jewel black elderberries
On the bush behind him.
We are becoming
Men,
Or something very like them,
Yet not, changeling others,
Cradle-snatched by the elfin king.
Our legs sprout hairs like summer leaves.
Days ago, in a tunnel,
All dark and roaring silence,
Closed on four sides by concrete I saw
The intermittent lights
Flash patterns on my arm -
The path of a river.
The wind in the grass.
My boyhood miraculousness,
Delayed adolescent grace.
I have never been more truthful
Or more free.
I dress myself in drooping wrists
And my father’s disappointment.
The ground is thick with clover and with barley grass.
The lichens on the medieval stones
Look back at me and do not blink.
This was a monastery once,
They whisper,
All that incense and piety,
Tonsure and sackcloth,
Psalmody and sodomy
Behind the sacristy at Matins.
So many men here.
None of them quite like us,
Transformed by witch’s brew
And sculpting hands.
None of them quite like us -
And all of them.

BlueSky: @paxmb.bsky.social

Tilly Aistrop
She/Her

Lilies of the Valley

the sun is at its peak;
our petals unravelling,
blush around the edges
markings like sunburn,
and toffee centres
ready to be devoured,
sprawling into one another’s space
until we’re sodden with pollen,
until are even our leaves
are intertwined,
tart lime tallows
running down my spine
while mine caress yours,
with each breeze
we pull closer
and our skin gets warmer,
still people walk past
and think of us,
as two separate flowers
curled up on a summer’s day.

IG: @tilly.a_

Bea Taylor
She/Her

“Too.”

People often attach this to me as a weakness; perhaps a slighted insult wrapped in sheer ribbon to seem harmless, but I see through each thread perfectly woven to judge me. You think I am too much. My desires are too grand, I romanticise a world that decays by the webbings of my feet, this is not masterful- it is naïveté. To need is a shameful fathoming.

Many hollowed creatures will tell me I am too full. Most bamboo sticks tunnelled with a hereditary emptiness will attest that branches are too fibrous. That each scraping, reaching tendril, aching with desire and potential falls short in the end.

Their rejection saves me.

Someday there will be a familiar beating of a distant drum, a hum made of summer rain and the bravery of staring doom in the face and finding hope in it anyway. I will hold the pieces of myself together until I hear my rhythm echoed ahead of me. I will scoop bundles of candid film through factitious faces, facetious fingers wagging and brows sighing at my brightness that, once more, seems in vain.

And I will see a figure in the forest. A palm that bleeds rapturous reds into everything it touches. Lips to petal curl around each delicate heart with promise. Eyes leaking cosmos and creation beyond the every man. This figure will not fit exactly where it is supposed to go. It is not the eight to my two, or vice versa. It is too. Our infinities will spill over guidelines I was advised to avoid crossing if I were to ever keep a lover. I was always awful at colouring within the lines, anyway.

You, amongst the rest, find tiers of love to spoon your tears and drink your fears like medicine. A ladder of intimacy, whereby you might ladle yourself into, delicately, what you find just artificially complex enough to keep yourself interested. Mine does not belong on any list, it cannot be printed, it wills not to be measured and claws beared to definition.

I see your insult as the mirror you shattered in your tantrum, when you realised one day: you have no clue who you are. Someone so sure of themselves, with those multitudes you desperately tie yourself to in balloons of capricious helium so you might stay afloat; I simply exist with them. In fact, I attract them, create them, supply them to others. Indeed, you might feel inadequate in comparison. It’s understandable you’d cut that tree down with those reflective shards of glass that bloody your tread, instead of taking a moment to investigate them, and find something real.

What a shame to live in the confines of your dullness. I stare into the doom, the mirror, I smile; I never shall.

IG: @nwsclippings

Liv Gamble
She/Her

Something Quick and Easy

My mother would boil eggs and butter bread for dinner,
on the days that had been hard –
on the days she most keenly felt the weight of her life.
‘Something quick and easy.’
The eggs would sit as jewels on our plates, the spoon’s cradle revealing
that nest of gold within.
It always felt fun, to excavate my dinner,
feeling like a child in a highchair,
drumming the top of the egg before leaving the shells to stagnate,
hollow, and cold.
My mother doesn’t eat eggs nowadays.
They don’t fit into her newfound diet, the myth of cholesterol
haunting her yet.
And I wonder if, when she’s gone, I will give them up too –
if they will go unbought and avoided in the supermarket aisles –
if they will remain eggs, or if death will stain them the way it stains so much else.
I wonder if they will carry her weight, for good or for bad,
when she no longer needs to.

IG: @livgamblevstheremix

Indee Watson
She/Her

Aphrodite

Lain upon a bed of honeysuckle,
Sweet scented and beautiful as her,
A smile of sunshine and moonlight alike,
Naked amongst the bugs,
As a dying thing, though rotten not,
She rests in almost breathless grace,
Her chest the wind, still as waters,
Rising and falling slight, that no
Woman or else gaze upon in anguish so.
Lest thee lain beside as one, and
Befall her spell of beguiling love, become
The honeysuckle in Aphrodite’s palm, that
She may soak in thine sweet perfume,
And collect thee, threaded and bore
Around her delicate neck.

IG: @indeewrites Web: indeewatson1103.wixsite.com/indeewrites

Dan Webber
He/Him

Make It Memorable and Personal to You

Once a year, at work
they make us change our passwords.
Last year mine was ‘breathe.’
This year it’s ‘keep breathing.’
I shouldn’t need the reminder,
but it’s getting harder to remember.

IG: @imgenrefluid Web: www.imgenrefluid.com

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