Photo by Steve McSkudder on Unsplash          Hijrah*   I’ve been here and there looking for my Promised Land hearing sweet voices through the wall and the sound of my boots on gravel straining my ear at the feedback crackle of the universe and treating it, like everything else, as primary evidence back…

      Gypsy moth   Taurus Mountains, the fiery air of Mesopotamia; she waits for it to caress her. It doesn’t. The English cousin. But she’s not entirely. Nor Kurdish, or Turkish. A gypsy moth Eurasian belongs in no one’s home with wings that let her fly but she cannot land on the pistachio tree…

        Touya   From the corner of my eye I take out the stars crush each new flame into a thousand embers Purple pits and spoiled stitches answer the glare, repeat the blank stare I keep stomp out each trace of contested traits Swarm the gleam in my own eye and spit out…

  Holly Loveday   Qikiqtaaluk or, Baffin Island   I move beyond the fact of you, but lay atop my suitcase on a 5th avenue sidewalk holding everything to do with you and the ground continues to rock left then right. My sodden back sore against the canvas cloth, shirt flaps out from my skin…

  Teresa Mignolli       Airports and Supermarkets   i At airports passengers meet and some fall in love and some fall ill. ii I met you at the supermarket and knocked over your basket. I said I’m sorry, didn’t mean to break your eggs — you invited me for dinner. iii At airports lovers…

  Pietro Bordi       Morning Sailing   Dawn comes, casts a light, disappears in overcast. On your hand I count the seconds it reveals itself. We climbed for this: brittle limestone and bright-green caper leaves gave way at last, and with your chanting friends with sour breaths careening off in front of us, this…

  Claudia Macey-Dare       The Northern line at 9:52   I wanted you to write to me, while I waited for the 9:30 train. No 9:44, not Euston, but Cambridge, came back, Euston Square in March, now a daily affair. Lying there in Archway, Archway, lying there. Heard a man with his beat up…

  Isobel Lewis-Jarvis       Language is a bowl of eel noodle soup   Eyes squint at the menu, sprawled with inky strokes of fish hooks; I try to negotiate the stencilled shapes the way I sculpted my name in hieroglyphs as a child or tried to clinch water in a sieve, and I wish…

  Florence Sandelson       Desert Island   Once my grandfather was on Desert Island Discs. Your voice came out of the radio dad had dusted off and propped up on the kitchen table and you told everyone your tuppence on survival. Interviewer loved it when you bought up Beethoven. Symphony to remind you that…

  Maleeha Mir       Southend on Sea, 2018   It’s hard to believe they’d be happy to sit there on plastic red chairs, ready to be thrown away by sunset. Happy to sit on the cobbled, shifting sand where they could watch us run and scream at each other (in civil tones, of course)…