Shiny-Eyed

By Joan El Faghloumi

From Christian Dior’s New Look onwards, she’d taken great care with her appearance: neat stockings, polished shoes, a svelte two-piece or chic dress worn with gleaming pearls. 

Hair styled fashionably, lipstick a juicy plum red. 

Discreetly rouged, delicately perfumed.

Shiny-eyed.

People remarked what a pretty woman she was. She’d tilt her smooth, round face appreciatively, smiling.

Yet... always aloof.

No real friendships.

Now, drowsy in her chair in Greenhavens, she tweaks her cardigan, sweeps her hand across her wispy grey crop, and turns misty eyes to the closed door.

Proud, always.

Certainly refined.

Forever hopeful.

But no one ever comes.

Running with Bros

By Sally Tate

I’m fat, female, forty,

yet you find me in your blindspot, brother, 

a tumbling mess

of flesh, breast, sweat,

an insult streaking by.

Would it help if I were younger?

packaged in tight tights, short shorts?

you’d then be happy to fall behind,

imagine your hands

ripping back hair,

driving a horse,

firing from behind the line?

But I ran midnight streets,  

ashamed of a body that moved -  

I sat on dusty sides of the track,

looking back with wonder and gratitude -

I drove my legs on

I pushed my heart through -

And I’ve earned my place, ahead of you.

Barefoot

By Helen Dudley

Barefoot she walked the barren plains

With dust-rimmed, tearful eyes.

Seeking refuge of a desert rock 

She stifled plaintive cries.    

A trophy of his male prowess,

He’d conquered her with lust,

And left without a kindly word.

Now she laboured in the dust.   

Like silent prayers the angels came;

She sensed their velvet tread.

A bastion of sisterhood

Gathered round her head.  

The comfort of their earthy breath, 

Their tender firm caress.

Sorority of female strength

Dispelled the lonesomeness.  

In love she birthed on barren plains,

A joy from deep inside: 

Her cubs delivered safely, 

And welcomed to the pride. 

In My Bed

By Marie-Louise McGuinness

Bugs are encamped in my bed, diminutive sentries to the monsters slumbering below.

Into a downward foetal position I curl, breath caught until cotton wool webs spin red on clenched eyelids. 

I'm all tucked in; head, toes, fingers. Limbs twisted in painful contortion beneath my sucked-in torso. 

And still, the alerted bugs clamber, prickling legs in proud march over my rippling skin.

I curse my faithless heart's overloud beating and lie frozen until morning, expecting the forceful grasp of a hook-nailed claw to drag me under.

When asked, I’ll say I slept fine.

I’m too old for a nightlight.

The Alchemy of Baking 

By Lizzy Hills

Legend has it that if you bake at dawn, the Roman God, Silvanus blesses your kitchen. 

She was no baker; her kitchen was purposefully missing a pastry brush. 

Yet for weeks she had dreamt of Mille-feuille: (thousand leaves): her mum’s signature pastry. 

When she was six, she imagined a thousand Elm leaves baked with puff pastry and vanilla pods, rising like a lofty, deciduous, Silvanus. 

Each mouthful tasting of vanilla bark. 

When she was ten, an Elm tree rooted inside her. 

As dawn broke, a thousand leaves nestled in her oven: patisserie alchemy. 

Her mum would have smiled knowingly. 

Where We Sit

By Dhevalence Moodley

He gripped, and he tore. And he bit, and he swore.

“Please excuse me,” he said, “It seems my tongue has become as rotten as my teeth.” 

The boisterous crush around him hushed, but sprays of sputum lingered in the air. 

With a swirl of refinement about him, the precise, confident tone of company bosses—too natural to feign—issued from him coolly. Yet the well-educated in boardrooms now sneered at him, as they did us. At him with us. 

Ravenous him, in a tattered Armani suit. Once, his ripped trousers’ seat would’ve shined one of those leather boardroom chairs.