CREATIVE SUBMISSIONS

Ghazal locked down

By Bethan Roberts

The path ahead is fogged but we’ll begin together - if we must be locked down, let’s be locked in together. Money’s low. We’ll work at finding work. We bind our hopes up – shining, cobweb-thin – together. I aim for strength and yet unpeel my flesh displaying demons, massing under skin together. Alone I’d let myself get lost in doubt, but our lives are fastened by a safety pin together. New neural pathways burst. I’ll heal for us - shuffle Spotify, let’s sway and spin together. This year, this house again must be our city – things break and fall apart, but we’re within: together.In the slow flow of thought, Writing on a Thursday Morning By Julie Chang Like a foetus in amnion,

My mind turns, slowly, over the last lines of a story.

I am trying to meld with my character,

To find her feeling. Softly, cupping my hands, gently breathing it alight,

To make it known.

Growing West By Ryann Overbay She only wanted to run with the big dogs. Guns roaring. Straw hat perched on her wicker head. Kicking up dust with her porcelain soles. Blazing trails of burnt rubber and cracked leather, choking on the smoke of dried out skeletons, metal bodies rusting in the yellow tree cemeteries. She only wanted to shake down the trailer park. Shatter the linoleum. Pry apart the rotting boards. Squeeze her wasted body out the cracks. To spit a fist west towards salty air and darkened skin, north towards knitted hats and cocaine tipped mountains. She only wanted to scream past humanity, lost and losing, those burnt-out husks of people. To illuminate the world with the low slow scent, heated sparking pine, sending her spinning and spiraling somewhere sweet. She only wanted to direct the rivers to her doorstep. Lift up the waters and peer beneath: distorted scales, fragmented fins, discarded razorblade talons. Peek at the moon and the shine and the bluster of beauty and wish it was hers. To sputter out to die low to talk hard to gasp close and swing flip skip through these last escapes until they left her aching for old dreams of white picket and green. green and white picket. picket white and green. She only wanted to cradle the feeling. Of minnow toes and fingers stretching her from inside out. Until the wanting was a thing, living and breathing and growing and laughing and all of the wanting in the world could never compare to this.