THE WINGED MOON
THE SAFE WAY
Elizabeth Loudon
The underbelly of this bridge
mirrors the swim of water
below where a man once sat in a hut
collecting the tolls of west-bound travellers
who paid him in pebbles.
He was vested with power
to arrest them all
but he weighed the stones
in his criss-cross palm,
considered the iron muzzle
and let them go down
the old road that rattles to Bristol.
I wade into the boiling foam
of farmyard run-off
to rescue fish whose tails slap hard,
mouths open mouths shut –
Oh Bristol city of slave ships,
city of deaths in hospital beds
where they gave my sister air to sip,
if I go west to the docklands
to hunt for the ghosts of sisters and sailors
will the man in the arable field,
rifle slung over his shoulder,
mute me when I could have sung?
THE STONE CHILD
Myfanwy Williams
When the flesh sours, understand this. The process
of petrification is always one of punishment,
meted out by the righteous to the unworthy.
Too many a Bronze Age monument oxidized to myth.
Clava Cairns in Alba, portal to the underworld,
Cornish Merry Maidens, cast in neolithic circles
for dancing on the Sabbath: and all along the gloaming,
Pipers rendered solid for song that conjured
such salacious mirth.
You called me stone child,
long before my feet stepped in time or my
fingers found the fiddle. You called me stone
child long before the buzzards flocked toward
my infant nest. When the flesh sours in natal
landing, understand this. Petrification begins
when all the tissue pores have emptied,
and water fills the cavity. Sulphur, iron,
calcite: a re-design, something akin
to birth, but not quite.
ART HORSES by Melissa Monroe
Melissa Monroe’s artworks are a personal display of vulnerable emotions. Her art is timeless and places the viewer in places no one can remember, places that have not yet been; they act as puzzles leading to the future. Melissa is a multi-disciplinary artist creating her visions in textiles, sculptures, and acrylic paintings. She is self-taught and has been a full-time artist for the past 10 years. Melissa explores her spiritual practice through mask making; this is further enforced through wearing and performing in them. She creates video installations of herself with the masks to be projected for live music performances. Instagram @melissamonroeart
Elizabeth Loudon is a novelist and poet based in Gloucestershire, UK. Her debut novel A Stranger In Baghdad was published in 2023 by Hoopoe Press (AUC). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including recently Whale Road Review, Pigeon Pages, Saranac Review, Hooghly Review, Southword, and Amsterdam Review. She can be found at elizabethloudon.com or @ESLoudon.
Myfanwy Williams is a queer Filipino-Welsh poet and novelist based in Sydney, Australia.
Her work focuses on ecology, social justice, decolonising politics, and intergenerational
trauma. Her poetry has been published by the South Coast Writers Centre and Writing
Between the Fences, and her first literary novel won a Harper Collins/Varuna Manuscript
Development Award. Myfanwy has a PhD in Social Science and Policy and teaches at the University of New South Wales. She is currently working on her second poetry collection and her second novel.