Poetry
By Alessio Zanelli
Shrouds of dust across the epochs.
Leagues and lustrums,
milestones left along forgotten roads.
By JC Williams
The potato peddler’s cry rings out
as streets yawn into another day.
Aloo, Aloo.
By Lauren Michelle Levesque
so many conversations
our dark humour.
By Rena J. Mosteirin
If whales, harpoons and swordfish
make you crazy to go to sea,
then go on, Ishmael, go to the fire
to rid yourself of this smoke.
By Susanna Lang
On the Nîmes road, we pass a tower on a hilltop, houses shoulder to shoulder, their tile roofs. We tell each other that we should go there sometime.
Prose
By Christina Riley
Seawilding was taken at the Ardfern headquarters of Seawilding, the UK's first community-led native oyster and seagrass restoration project.
By Christina Riley
An Anthropology of Turquoise is a triptych named after a book by Ellen Meloy of the same name, from my time as an artist-in-residence at Knockvologan Studios on the Isle of Mull.
Read by Anna Evans
No we didn’t belong to
those who still remembered
this river’s
voice in song
when it had flowed freely
By Janet MacDonald
Syria: civil war, ISIS, refugees, earthquake, these are the words that come to mind. The accompanying images of destruction and displacement served up in the mainstream media are seared into our psyche.
By Nick Paul
The air was cool and fresh. Clouds scuttled across the sky and parted now and again to give glimpses of the infinite blackness beyond. Jack embraced the night, swallowing lungfuls of air, his troubles already slipping away.
By Andleeb Shadani
I still remember that house. A grand palace, like a child’s dream, with endless doors and corridors, no shadows, no screams.
By Barry Smith
I have never found that hill easy to climb. No matter how I focused my imagination in the pretence that I was a grand tour leader - and soon to be crowned King of the Mountains - some insistent devilish voice inside my head would prevail.
By Ben Morris
I'm back on the bus. I'm a no-flyer, and Paris-Turin trains are still out.
By Sayani Sarkar
The moment you step inside the South Park Street Cemetery, you enter a green enclosure far away from the hustle-bustle of Kolkata’s roads. The petroleum fumes of the busy metropolis give way to a damp, mossy smell typical of graveyards.
By Alison Roe
The mist lifts teasingly. The sea brightens, taking on a bluish hue, and above it green-topped cliffs appear, glowing gently in the thin sunshine.
By Hope Yancey
A couple approached us as we lingered at the trailhead in the park. “Are you here to see the Venus flytraps?” the man asked my husband and me, eager to share his excitement with someone else.
By Jos Sinnott
I’ve recently been thinking about the idea of ‘home’. What does it mean to leave home? To long for home? To return home?
By Kat Hill
It’s a cold day in early February; the air is still and the sun bright. A pair of metal gates adorned with the tree of life face the road that runs through the city of Gdańsk.
By Katherine Abbott
It's getting close to the end of my trip. This morning, I'm walking with that usual sense of dread.
By Giselle Bader
Forests are thick places. They are suffused with history and folklore, their denseness and darkness absorbing the memories and experiences of all those who have moved through it.
By Morelle Smith
It was Francesca’s idea to go to Jurkalne. Someone she met in Riga at the film festival had travelled round Latvia’s western coastline on his motorbike and the best place, he said, was not a town or village but a stretch of beach below a high sand dune, like an overlooking cliff, held in place by a pine forest.
By Rebecca Gransden
Tight roads, the verge gone wild in too quick a time, grass spread in a craze, strange zig zag stems, leaves mash with fronds, buds nod rot fruit and drop to make squelch meat tracks.
By Sam Francis
We wake at Pistyll Rhaeadr waterfalls. New greens are settling in. Foxgloves sculpt the edges of pathways and roads pink and purple in their standings.
By Kate Chandler
“Stop. Where are you from?”
Armed with pepper spray and a scowl, the border guard at Pembroke Dock isn’t messing around.
By Nicola Healey
Because I could not find a place,
I stopped fighting
and let the world swallow me whole.