About Zoe Brooks: Zoe Brooks worked with disadvantaged communities in London and East Oxford before returning to her native Gloucestershire to write and grow vegetables. Zoe has been widely published in print and online magazines and appeared in the anthology 'Grandchildren of Albion'. Her long poem 'Fool's Paradise' won the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition award for best poetry ebook 2013. About Owl Unbound (Indigo Dreams Publishing) ‘Owl Unbound’ examines nature and

Blank pages wait for me to fill them with fragments of uncountable words Blank pages wait for my pen to run around them I feel that they are glaring at me, and I hear their voices resounding <Fill me with your ink. Fill me with your tears.> I'm exposed to their pressure, and I dive into a slump My pen stops, and words become haze I'm sorry, blank pages I need time, not pressure Yuu Ikeda is a Japan based poet. She loves writing, reading mystery novels, and drinking sugary cof

The image of you being warned and shot by two cops sinks and drowns in my brain; sometimes your ghost baby eyes open, question me - "When shall I grow up?" Never in this neighborhood, I windowshop real estates, and none is anymore real than those holes in your chest as if you illustrate what hiraeth means. You metamorphose into the word of the day. Words power our society, and yet I work on the kin in silence. No. No. No. I hallucinate you, and a place where safe hangs from t

What you don’t realise, Madame Laurent declares Is that every sixteen-year-old is beautiful. The boys titter, looking around the class. A good joke for les autres later, in the yard. The handful of girls blush. Yet now, when I think of Madame’s words Her wrinkled visage and shaky eyeliner, thick as slugs on her lids, If I look back at photographs of us taken in the half-light of our school years I creep towards understanding Beauty: That unstained palette before life begins,

The bird hides inside, tucked inside my ribcage too rotten to present. Bodies twist, limbs flail but I didn’t come. Dark and black and wet, he’s swimming in the sweat of other women, rotten to the heart. The bird is in here, barely visible in the sick hot summer, intent on murdering angels. Even through the cigarette smoke and birthday cologne he’s in my heart—I can smell him. Holly Day (hollylday.blogspot.com) has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minn

It wasn’t what we went looking for. We went for flint axe heads. The farmer, before my parents, had found axe heads beside the crumbling grey stone wall at the top of North Field. We spotted them on our last trip to the Scottish Museum, in the cold echoey downstairs part, go past the Vikings and turn left at the ancient boat remains and there they are. So small, sat in a class case with the farm name beside them, seemingly insignificant compared to the vast hillsides they cam