CLASSIFIED POETRY: ‘REPRESSION’ BY HAYLEY CANNON
Warm, warm, warmer, hot until suddenly in relief. The thought you never thought you’d have the image it shocked you to conceive of pops lurches out of the autostereogram. Sirens pierce the quiet, trapdoor opens [….]
CLASSIFIED FICTION: ‘THE WIDOW AND HER DAUGHTER’ BY EWA MAZIERSKA
Of all the houses on our street, the last but one was the most mysterious to me. Or, to be precise, it was simply unknown. There was no mystery, because there was no curiosity on my part to learn what was going on […]
CLASSIFIED FICTION: ‘A MATTER OF TRADITION’ BY LARRY LEFKOWITZ
I had often heard it remarked that there was something unusual about the Bevin-Atleys, but when I asked precisely what, the speaker, at a loss to define it, would simply wave a hand in the air in a circular motion like some distraught falcon circling aimlessly […]
CLASSIFIED POETRY: ‘ZOETROPE’ BY BEN BARTON
Aliens have crawled across the border on their bellies Signed names in blue biro: Permits to trespass on our living quarters. We are powerless, shackled destined to watch […]
CLASSIFIED FICTION: ‘LORD OF THE DANCE’ BY SANDRA ARNOLD
Clutching her list, Liberty pushed open the library door and skidded across the floor to a startled young man behind a mahogany desk. She waved her list and asked where she should look. He pointed to the top floor, where people were drifting […]
CLASSIFIED ARTWORK: ‘VANISHING HOPES I’ BY EMMANUEL MONZIES
Emmanuel Monziès is transposing living material like plants and bodies on paper or on canvas with a predilection for monotypes. Runner-up for the next Creative Quarterly #54 journal (November 2018 for publication in April 2019) […]
CLASSIFIED FICTION: ‘TRUTH MAY RISE IN THE CREAMY FROTH OF THE NEXT BEER’ BY SALLY RYHANEN
If there is a patron saint for the evil of heart, she must be Irish. There was my target, dangling upside down from a rustic lighthouse, begging to be rescued. Smack in front of an Irish pub. Sanderson’s regular position, according to the barman of the Shamrock Hotel […]
CLASSIFIED POETRY: ‘THE SECOND QUESTION’ BY MIKE TOOK
I’m a non-British resident, transgender working pensioner I’m a means-tested, mixed race, unpaid contracted support-worker I’m a non-white, gender fluid, single parent lesbian I’m a child of Muslim parents, asexual, agnostic […]
CLASSIFIED NON-FICTION: ‘A CASUAL SUNDAY TOURIST’ BY LAZARUS TRUBMAN
As I get older, people and events disappear from my memory, but some, thank goodness, stay there forever. Like the story of a murder I never committed. It was in 1980, a Sunday at the end of February or in the beginning of March. I was in the Army reserve […]
CLASSIFIED POETRY: ‘BORDERLINES’ BY MICHAEL SAUNDERSON
1972 EAST Harvesting rice near the borderline, sedentary spine smarts from paddy field graft. Sore calloused hands gesticulate in cultural exchange over cabbage bowls. Borderline conscious counting stars […]