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Laura Benson, Louise Longson, Vikki C, Kim Malinowski


YOUR ALLURING NATURE, LAURA BENSON
YOUR ALLURING NATURE, LAURA BENSON

SHE STRADDLES BORDERS

Louise Longson


hides in corners

                      quoins    nooks


recessed      mouth-full of stone

she is    shadowbeast

                                 deep-

         carved relief

in wanton / loose / restless pose


holding wisdom above the door


she is the key-

stone

bearing bridges

 

she holds the wall 

of a well      the slab of a tomb


she slips

            from meaning to meaning—

object / subject / abject


wide-open  

cunt agape


she welcomes you 

( back )

over a threshold 

into the womb








SURROGATE BEAUTY

Vikki C


We begin at the closing of floral-semantics. Cultivating,

where light choirs soft, a clavicle for low-key acoustics.


Whatever we fail at here is a veil, blind to its own sheerness.

The mountain darkens. Offers its protest-field to our limbs.


We creep, as animalia, as precious quartz, ringed in devastation.

Because antiquity sounds its instrument through a valley,


your breathing leafs me open with each high wind.

Our names are reclaimed by a kind war, but never mercy.


A glint of a village smoking in its burnished romance. 

We diagnose each depression as late ocean trauma. I heed


the lanterned pass, shedding possessions. Extend my grief

to fresh predictions of flood. To the remote haven they charter


through a corrupt lens. I taste the inchoate. The vapour of

non-human reservoirs. Desist in the liminal we can’t embellish.


Deny the funereality of a gaze. Your veins burst into echinacea.

Translation: you learn of pleasure more than once, without regard.


We must indulge now, in this solemn honey. In our dwindling cirque.

Hard frost, planetary pause. A climatic self, disowned by its natural mother.







FIND ME IN SEARCH OF MY SUNFLOWERS

Kim Malowinski


beaten and muddy with blood. 


Cuts on my hands so torn, scraped sunlight,

history searching for love in dirt,

stratigraphy on my tongue.

Artifacts flower too savory


dusty with someone’s love and with mine,

my too dry touch and my loamy silt fingers.


Can you see petals so majestic

but so hard, buried in earth,

waiting to flower?



Laura Benson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Birmingham, Alabama with an interest in sacredness and ritualistic practices. Benson’s practice is, at its core, an exploration into the creation of a personal mythology. This entails creating work across a variety of mediums including clay, collaged images and found objects, metal, fabric, printmaking methods and oil painting. It also includes a focus on storytelling, folklore and religious myth. She finds art-making to be a valuable avenue for uncovering and exploring the mystical and mysterious aspects of the natural and supernatural world.


Louise Longson is a Pushcart-nominated poet and  2023 winner of the Kari-Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize with the collection These Are Her Thoughts as She Falls (Ballerini Book Press), and the Hedgehog Press Proper Poetry Pamphlet competition with chapbook The How in the World (published 2025). Louise’s poems are widely published in print and online. Her previous chapbooks are Hanging Fire (Dreich 2021) and Songs from the Witch Bottle (Alien Buddha Press 2022). She works in mental health recovery in Oxfordshire.


Vikki C. is the author of two collections including Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press). Vikki’s work appears in Psaltery & Lyre, The Inflectionist Review, Stone Circle Review, EcoTheo Review, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, Sweet Literary, Harpy Hybrid, The Winged Moon, Ice Floe Press, Hyacinth Review, Dust Poetry, Black Bough Poetry & The Belfast Review, among others. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize & Orison Best Spiritual Literature.


Kim Malinowski is the author of Home, Phantom Reflection, and Buffy's House of Mirrors. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and the Rhysling Award. She writes because the alternative is unthinkable.

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