![]() ![]() We've had an amazing response to the feedback form, thank you. If you haven't filled it out, please take a moment to have your say. The picture is the starting point, the text is up to you. Volume 08, Chapter 04 is now open for submissions. He fills notebooks with words and scribbles, and his writing has been published in anthologies, zines, blogs and as part of other creative projects.Visual Verse: An Anthology of Art and Words After living in Oxford and West Yorkshire, he now spends much of his time meandering along the canals, rivers and footpaths of southern England, on foot or aboard a very slow narrowboat. Jack Pritchard grew up in the part of Dorset that Thomas Hardy called ‘the Vale of the Little Dairies’. And tomorrow I will be gone, downstream to watch new skies over other hills We have settled, in these few days, into a routine of our sunsets and our searches. It is a routine that has formed quickly: the owl’s perch on the gatepost, the half-blind Canada goose who visits each dusk in search of food, and the spider who, each night, anchors a vast new web across the airy ocean of my open window and feasts on the mosquitoes drawn in by my breath and heat. She lands again on the gatepost on the opposite bank, and waits again to ruffle herself and launch into the wind. I say it aloud and am sure that it is the right word for her searching flight. She is quartering the field, I think, before realising that I do not fully know what ‘quartering’ means. On the opposite bank, a barn owl is hunting. I think of the fathom below me, alive with the silvery fish that rise at night to torchlight, the pike that steal them from the fishermen’s hooks, and below that, the millennia of lost things settling in the silt. The anchor catches, and an airy crewman scrambles down the rope to disentangle it. I half-remembered a poem, a haunting image of a ship appearing in the air, and an anchor dropped from an upper world into our own. ![]() When I first stopped here I dived down towards the anchor, to pull the rope and check that it had held. Every few hours I check the anchorlines, to see if the rise of the river needs me to loosen the knots. In the morning, the wakes of Caversham Lady, Cheetah and African Queen of London make it nod in the water. It feels like being at sea.Īt night I feel the boat rock above these depths, as gusts of wind catch and pull and anchors hold firm. Six feet at least from the steel baseplate to the silt of the riverbed: a fathom or more. It feels deep too, and inside the boat I sense its depth beneath me. The water here is deep, deeper than a ten-foot bargepole can reach down. I reach the boat, swing the grocery-bag onto the back deck and then scramble up after it. Instead, I have dropped two anchors, front and rear, and the boat is suspended between them, hanging in the water. But here there was nowhere to moor, and I was in a mood for solitude. I would normally have found a place to moor, a length of riverbank where I could hammer-in three galvanised mooring-spikes and tie the ropes of the boat to them, a place where I could step from boat to bank without difficulty. Reaching deeper water I strike out for home, swimming amid the raindrop splashes, my eyes fixed on the white narrowboat at anchor against the wide willows a hundred yards upstream. It is July and light rain has started to fall. There is not space for my clothes, so I add my phone and wallet to the bag, seal it, and then wade out into the Thames fully dressed. On the riverbank at dusk I repack my shopping, stuffing my boots with tangerines and ground-coffee, and putting them, along with milk and bread and cereal-bars into a waterproof bag. James was shortlisted for Outspoken’s Performance Poetry Prize 2020 and Commended in The Winchester Poetry Prize 2020 judged by Andrew McMillan.Ĭreative Non Fiction from issue One Photo by Olga Lioncat on James’s poems have been published in various magazines including The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Cardiff Review, Popshot Quarterly,Confluence and Dawntreader. His poetry collection Manatomy is published by Burning Eye. His plays published by Samuel French include Rubber Ring and Time and Tide. James McDermott is a queer writer based in East Anglia. Monster made of two men’s writhing bodies To dirt tracks trudged down at thirteen achingįor the sun to come out nothing has changed Her Twitter handle is Photo by Kristina Paukshtite on COTTAGE Daydreaming with a dram is a perfect combo. ![]() She is a MA poetry graduate of Manchester Metropolitan University and a reviewer for. In 2018 her pamphlet ‘The Heart of the Run’ was published by Picaroon Poetry and her full collection ‘A West Coast Psalter’, Kelsay Books in the New Year, 2021. Maggie Mackay loves family history, winding it into lyrical poems published in print and online journals. Whispered softly under a wrap of breath and sanctuary. ![]()
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