Virgil speaks much of bees ("little Romans" he calls them, for their diligence and loyalty) but says nothing about wasps -- which is a shame because their biography is at least as illustrious, and frankly more dramatic. I might write a treatise on bees but I would stage a drama about the wasp. As summer slides into fall, tribes of bees flirt with goldenrod and the dwindling vetch and yarrow, with the aster's first surge, in the interstitial realms along the river-banks. Butte

Shams’ mother didn't invent a time machine. At least, she was sure she hadn’t. Shams said this to the strange woman that stood next to a large black box in her living room. The box was as big as the TV and on top of it were two sets of antennas and several buttons and dials. A blue spark snapped between the stalks of the antennas; the lights in the room flickered. The woman exhaled sharply, an impatient sigh. Her long, grey hair was tied up in a sloppy bun, thick curls escapi

Lightfall the sun doesn't set; the black rises. like a bruise giving colour to the bone of a beautiful face. and driving from the city on the coast road and eastward you can watch; the sky darking like the shadow of rising pines in lines and along the horizon. they creep; all down arrows and birdfoot to cap, as if the blue up there were the music from humming guitar strings and the black were a hand coming down. look west, toward the blue; it diminishes. shrinks lower, gets s

They say the best rocks for tumbling are very hard. I am not. They say the best rocks are dense, without voids or pore spaces. I always feel the void, some sort of void. I don’t know it and it comes from the unknowable and I try to fill it with grounding things, tangible things, like rocks. Let’s not get started on my pores. They say the best rocks are free of fractures. This is because even tiny fractures can cause the rock to break. Broken pieces have sharp edges, which wil

The thunder and the rain have become commonplace. Nina has been working from home for the whole of the pandemic, in the cramped room off the kitchen which she and Radiyah have taken to calling their supply closet. The back door of the kitchen opens to the wet kitchen, then out the gate to the alley between the rows of linked houses, and once a day the before-rain smell wafts in from there. Then the thunder cracks. The equatorial rains often fall perpendicularly, a torrent wit

And Joe’s pockets are stuffed with fizzy rockets to get us there. Our footprints turn the snow to Swiss cheese. ‘How long will it take?’ ‘Well, it’s ten thousand miles away and it doesn’t have an airport.’ ‘All day then?’ ‘Probably.’ I can’t remember the last time I spent all day with Joe. Definitely before he started big school. Before his bedroom door was always closed. Before before before. The gate to the park is an iceberg groaning. No one’s here so I don’t have to wait

There. The curved top poking up. Soil gently falling down the sides. The raised golden pattern peeling slightly, as fraying grey edges betrayed its age. I was surprised though the cardboard had lasted this long to be honest. We sat back on our heels. Ready to face our youth. Explore our time capsule. We couldn’t remember what was inside. We just knew where it was buried. Underneath this old beech, in the garden. We had to dig it up now. Before new hands swung on the branches,

folding the decade over on itself acting normal and almost succeeding passing invisible through time and times unnaming each moment as it collapses with a whisper like the first taste of sugar incurable childhood never looking forward never looking back no lack of sunlight morning the only day spring the only season eyes in everything in bark in candles in voices and voices in everything in windows in water in love in gravel in blue stars haunting inner ears in the sideboard

My skin’s not delicate, nor my thoughts subtle. I’ve lived hand to mouth, rambled many roads and bathed in ice-cold mountain streams. My chemise, I’ve scrubbed with pebbles on treeless lakeside shores. That’s where I met him, though he was in fact a her, and now a them. Disrobed, sweaty from my uphill trek, I scythed my front crawl through the loch for twenty minutes before I noticed I was being watched, and not by rabbits. I didn’t blush or simper, but said to my audience of

T/W - Anxiety, mental distress and suicidal thoughts It is the little things, the ones that matter. You forget about them, because they are so little, those little things. You do not see them anymore, because they are so little. You actually forget about those little things, and even start to think they might actually not matter. For the last 6 weeks, I was waking up in a bed that was strange to me and not my 'home'. It was a strange home, not mine. And at night, I was also