An online magazine of poetry and short fiction www.harkmagazine.co.uk Info – harkeditor@outlook.com EDITORS Matthew Apperley and Owen Vince All rights reserved. Work published remains under the ownership of its respective author. Hark reserves all reproduction rights. 2014
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Contents 5 Owen Vince Editorial 7 Isla Anderson Four Poems 12 Jared Carnie Looping 14 Jane Roberts Charon’s Obols 15 Bethany Pope A Rough Passage 16 Charlotte Stevens Two Poems 21 Mark McKee Almost Famous 22 Nina Lewis Clench 24 Dan Ivec Two Poems 26 Imogen Foster Oranges
4 28 Frederick Pollack The Big Bucks 31 Jake Reynolds It All Comes To Siege 32 Katharina Dixon-Ward Dreaming with a dead recording 33 James Bruce May On Herons’ Wings 35 Contributors
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Editorial What does “liminal” writing look like? What do we mean when we say that art should “extend perception”? A scene, in one of Nabokov's short stories A Busy Man. A car passes around a bend in the road. The author, the protagonist, watches. Its lamps are not “light”, but two “tangerine tusks” that plunge into the pavement. Another scene, Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine. The character – obsessively, deliberately – spends page after page describing the merits and demerits of plastic straws. Both scenes, imaginations, are rooted in the “real”. The author – through an act of extended perception, by paying observation, by letting imagination detach itself from worn cliché or tight realism – sees things beautifully, truthfully. Straws and headlamps. This, for us, is what great art achieves. It doesn't force creation, nor simply strain the strange into being. Instead, it extends our perception over things as they seem to appear. It ruffles feathers, rather than plucking the bird bare. It is a changed angle, a different glance. It is looking at the moon in a shard of broken mirror rather than peering at it through a telescope. It’s what we love and what we look for in editing HARK. We have a handful of great gems to present to you here. Minds at work, peering at things differently, closely. Unafraid to see “tangerine tusks” where others would see headlights. Thank you for reading Issue Two. We've encountered some brilliant minds and writers, who you can read in the following pages. We're glad to announce new names as well as familiar ones. We're also experimenting with the form of the magazine. From the outset we wanted HARK to be predominantly about our writers. To stay as true to this as possible we’ve decided to tweak the layout. Both the HARKVIEW and Afterword are going to be given their own special place on the site. We hope that this will encourage both dedicated reading and discussion through our comments section. In this regard, we are extremely happy to present a long and thoughtful interview with Frederick Pollack, poet and author of The Adventure and Happiness. His interest and innovation in narrative poetry, as well as shorter, socially conscious lyric poetry, represents both a dazzling method coupled with a deceptively modern chattiness. Also, Matthew will be discussing the state of reading as craft in his essay “The Death of the Reader”. Both pieces will be on the site shortly after launch.
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With two issues under our belts, we're also looking to expand the content and scope of the magazine. We will be setting up a blog on our website (harkmagazine.co.uk), which will feature new content including a series of reflective pieces on authors and poets who we feel represent our aesthetic. We now receive a large number of submissions for each issue, which is fantastic. In order to ensure that we can manage this as efficiently as possible, we will be looking to take on a new member of HARK to handle readings and other tasks. Keep an eye on our website for future details. It has been a pleasure reading for and preparing this, our second issue. Thank you for reading. Keep coming back. Owen Vince
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Cherry Pitting Isla Anderson
It is August and we are sitting on the lawn with our sticky hands and our grass-stained limbs and our gap-toothed shamelessness; a dish of cherry stones between us, spittle warm. These are the ripening days. He tells me the secrets my sleeping body had kept from me until now; about my flesh; about the iron in my blood, and how it’s drawn towards the boys who take with hot, magnetic hands. Boys like him; his nine years old; his grubby dungarees. These are the swallowing days. He is teaching me to cherry-pit; he’s sweetening my tongue; I’m learning what to leave and what I may consume. Never the stone at the centre, he says. We never swallow the truth. In stripping away the cushioning fruit of the August he swallowed me whole, I start to panic, bite my tongue; I taste his flood. Now are the days when a crimson smile catches in my throat; the days I cough him up in stones and swallowed blood.
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Bathwater Isla Anderson
Your grandmother is dying. We sit on your bed with the lights left out, a deluge of bathwater-sky in the room, in the air from the open window, wetting the walls and the slate of our cheeks; stained grey where the last of the children have bathed; have scrubbed the dust of days from their skin; have risen pink and wet and warm from where they sank as pebble stones; as rubble tossed by hands that didn’t know their worth; as ammunition that was only ever fired for effect— cinnabar and quartz beneath their flint; beneath our skin, you said that we were the last of the children: bloody knuckles, knotted hair; who learnt to speak though tongues
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still swollen dry with salt; who learnt to swim; who learnt the art of staying clean in filthy water. Your grandmother is dying and you tell me of her lungs; of oil coating every feather in her chest. Time, you say, is molten tar that clings to every shore, and to the wings of every swan it anchors there.
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They Would Have Called Me Isabel Isla Anderson
In the Lascaux-hollows of my mother’s painted womb, I met a bloody-kneed reflection of myself; half-formed— a dark, primordial thing, and then an absence, linen-stained, and nearly three months premature; she left her etchings, but she didn’t last the Spring.
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A Letter To Issy, The Girl Who Kept bees Isla Anderson
They say honey never goes bad but I am rotting, Issy. I’m rotting— my mouth, a shaken hive, spilling syrup on the ground that caught me softly in its undergrowth the day you beat me down; a stick to bark of the ancient branch I hung my silence from; there is nowhere else to hang my silence from, not now when the bridges we built from our moth-eaten veins are burning; dissolving us down into rivers of ash and Ophelia-blood, bright blue where the clots of your irises loosened and fled this perpetual heparin wound. The swarm in my mouth is a needle-less stack of stingers and you, and you, and you didn’t want me over your head with the honey that wouldn’t spoil. But it held me there. I didn’t opt for its glue. You told me a hive was a sacred thing, then split mine clean in two.
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Looping Jared Carnie
Today my brain is a year 6 disco. It’s all over-gelled hair, Too big shirts, Sparkling studs in little ears. The boys stand on one side While the girls do routines Over by the frowning DJ. It’s all the fault of this one song. I don’t know how it got in there. It must have wormed it’s way in Fifteen years ago And found a place to nestle. My mind never thinks to check. It’s not played on the radio anymore And I’m not even sure what it’s called. But since last night Arriving back at my mum’s house Watching her make polite conversation With my dad Something must have moved around up there And exposed it, Because now Reading the paper Walking to Tesco
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Watching T.V It’s in there Looping endlessly While the boys put their hands On the hips of the girls And the girls put their hands On the shoulders of the boys And they stand in one neat line By the right wall of my brain Rocking awkwardly from side to side.
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Charon's Obols Jane Roberts She’s worried about the gold, worried it will become exhausted one day. And then what will happen? Will anything be as good a replacement for the gold? The soul has mass, the American scientist said. Although the theory has been discredited by most scholars, the undertaker believes it. The soul leaves the body; exhaled, an unburdened sigh into the ether. The body becomes 21 grams lighter, the air 21 grams more dense. As an undertaker, she has to believe in this theory. Has to believe in something more than the static chilled stillness in front of her on the mortuary slab. She believes a soul has worth. Often she thinks of all those souls lining up on the banks of the river Styx to meet ferryman Charon. Carrying with them the gold obols placed in their corpses, as payment for the river crossing, transportation from Limbo to the Underworld. And there’s another myth she believes in: that the gold blocks the soul from passing back into the body. So she likes to replace the absent 21 grams with gold, burying the treasure – secure – under rigid, purpling tongues. But today’s price of gold-soul-ratio and tomorrow’s could be so very different: everything fluctuating – unstable prices, weights, unfathomable values – all oscillating between solid mass and the insubstantial. It distresses her and she wonders. What will happen when the gold runs out? Would a baser, poorer metal do? What weight would be equivalent to those 21 grams of gold? And if there’s no gold, will the souls return to their corporeal prisons, suffocating beneath the earth, smouldering with the ashes? She is right to worry – the gold will run out eventually. People never stop sighing.
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A Rough Passage Bethany Pope
I watched the fur-seal give birth on the rock; the infant's loose head lolled on stone, between it's mother's hind flippers. She could gain no traction, there was nothing to push against. The baby looked dead, caught in the casing of womb, until another anxious wouldbe mother gripped the pup's neck in her teeth and pulled. Out slid the baby, slippery as it would be in water, placenta spooled behind it like a tail and pooled, red and glistening, in a granite hollow. It lay there and gasped as the fierce cows fought and tore their hides, debating custody while seagulls with razor beaks sliced the soft umbilical, devouring streaked strips of red tissue. The blind baby sought a breast.
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Your poem – Travellers Charlotte Stevens Suppose it is always historical, This long-shore drift, this new world, and the ways In which, sedimented, we come to it. When our crates came pouring off the ships and Our axes struck them open on the sand, Our once bare feet, hands, bare-arses scrambled Up the scree, squiff limbs and joints Clattering over the foreshore shingle. Then from behind the beyond crackle-thorns, Dune settlements, our rudimentary Battlements, our peeping faces saw, there, Our shoreline change and an exchange of sorts Took place on this down-drifting patch of beach. A baseline fort and harbour; in our hands A few sum of seeds and stones, nothing more With wealth being the rush of river water, Wealth being the sand upon which fish land, Wealth being those things slipped through our cupped hands. Stone by stone, in a patchwork of deaf-blind Languages in which all meaning was lost Yet was ceaselessly becoming, flowing, Stone by stone, this sound fort, by us, was built, Asymmetries abounding in its forms. Then there were signposts, paths, rights of way, roads, And he is walking on them, my lovely man, Feeling every crack beneath his too thin soles,
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Feeling the sun heavy on his un-sunned arms. In searching for shaded space, we find this Common ground: collaboration, you, me, Proffering such cosmopolitan ideals Of fairness, justice, rights as accretion,
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A Passage Charlotte Stevens In the beginning it was a ship leaving port With the pistol crack of the sails unravelling, Close hauled, off-centre, rapid, invigorating, Slamming right into space, back to the faithless wind. My eyes as wet and my chest lifted and open As the time I knew your touch and I remembered Everything. Looking back I remembered every Thing. During that crossing there was always my right arm Reaching behind me like my shadow in evening, But also my left inching forward on each wave. To release a firm hold on what is known leaves us little Peace, and no silence, only motion. But Quite firmly hung between two poles, we were nothing. Rather, I was nothing. I had the luxury Of nothing in the quiet shifting of the boat. I undressed myself for your absence every night. The silent revelation of the underside Of my breasts, my ribs, my left hipbone, then my right, Shifting the weight in the room, rolling the centre Of me forward onto the very balls of my feet. But at my back were always the earthen pathways Of my childhood which had crept aboard carried on Spores and in actual feathers of sea birds, Carried in the sweet water we stashed in barrels, Carried even by me: gentle knocks reminding Me of the distance growing, the wind behind me, Edging on, still connecting me still like a cord, Like a drawn man to the places from which I came
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Where wanderings led always round to the same place. And so I was held, in that place, in suspension. And then. And then there seemed to be a line across The eye. A floating thing. Another thing in my view, And my fingers itched and grasped for it and somewhere I lost hold of that precious tension of knowing What was and not what might be. Dislocated. Halliards flying flung by a spin of the helm: Around and around and out, out and all about. Those first weeks on land, amongst overwhelming trees: An amphibiousness; light crooked in water. Vows that existed as footprints not lightly made But easily made all the same, obscured in mud; You see, it was not two sides of a silver coin. You see, it was not that where there were once feathers Are now these big black boots shod thick in all their mud. More so, it was simply about where the light falls. And now in this village between three hills where I reside There are trees of course, and people and systems and language, And sometimes something carried on the air that reminds me Of something lost, but I have noticed there is no sunset Only the dusk drawing down. There are few long shadows here And the ocean I once sailed has become a small and muddy Pool in a wooded place where sometimes there is the rise of A fish and it is invigorating to know that life Can exist, determined, in such a place, a cup as this. But I was never a fish, and you were never a hook; You were never the thing to pluck me from my small place and Leave me in gasping and euphoric asphyxiation. Put simply, I paid passage from one place to another.
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Some of what came on the winds over the wide sea with me Left and pushed other sails to other places. Gone. Other, Smaller parts perhaps stayed on me: under my fingernails, Salt held softly in the depth of my hair. But even that Has now dispersed. These days I see in a mullioned way. For me, now, the thing, the actual thing that has become Real, most real to me, are these soft piney boards where I lie In my kitchen by the stubborn feet of this blackened stove. They are as scorched and clean as the palms of my hands worked rough. When I lie upon them, I have nowhere left to fall to. I am prone and pure and nothing. It feels like faithlessness, And in this I find a remarkable robust freedom. This is an idea hard to explain to steadfast people, I know. But hear this: if I press my own hands to my own eyes And hold them there, two moons oscillate in colours and space And I am the village’s three hills each and every one, And each thing on them innumerable unknowable As the glint and rustle of something moving in bracken. In the night under the light of those moons, I might lie here On my clean boards and may awake with a leaf in my hair, The milk soured, and a memory of some sentiment You once offered strewn across my face as a spider’s web. But the moonlight is never enough, and the dew dries and Leaves me for the skies, and it is just these boards that remain.
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Almost Famous Mark McKee
First he shoots himself in the face. Next he grabs a broom from somewhere offstage, comes back and sweeps his face into a fleshy pile. Meantime, his neck stump is sputtering and fluid is oozing and an effete man in the front row always passes out, always. But Scott keeps sweeping. Now, with his face in a pile, he reaches in to find what remains of his lips. He makes a big show of it, spreading offal around the stage. "Gotcha," he says finally. It's for the audience - he knows where the lips are. But it's nice to give them the impression it required more work. He brings the lips to his neck stump, and, making gurgling sounds from somewhere deep in his chest, tries to approximate the smack of a wet kiss. Invariably, a kid in the front row, usually to the left of the effete man who passed out, says, edging forward in his chair, "Mom, can I do that when I grow up?" And because his mother is not paying attention, because her eyes are closed and she's wearing headphones, because she brought him here so she could have a few moments of quiet, his mother says, "Sure, whatever you like." Mutely, Scott mouths the mother's words with his disembodied lips. It is the same advice his mother once offered him.
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Clench Nina Lewis Hands have known places and people. Feet remember walking through long grass, along towpaths, under bridges made from red brick. Young feet running. Eyes still see, sometimes out of focus. Feet, too tired to manage she sits in his chair, brings a small part of him down to enjoy the water. Imagining he is here still, wrinkled hands round over shoulders. You are held the same. You were alive, in the chair she stood behind you, resting hands on your shoulders just the same.
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Her legs still work. Sitting in the warmth of your seat makes her feel closer to you. Memories flash through her agile mind, at speed. A montage of time, recaptured. Slowly the sounds of nature call her back. Wheeling herself beneath trees, sheltered by dark branches, she listens. Feels you are almost there. Pushes the chair forward feet inches from the edge. You loved water. Perhaps you will come now. She sits and waits. Holding onto her last piece of you.
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The Rain Teacher and Daughter, 1926 Dan Ivec In another classroom the rain teacher is thinking. He says try, and the students try their hands and eyes at it. But one boy left his heart wrapped in a thin towel downstairs. He raises a colorless hand to go and save his life and he runs to the floor and the halls where his blood has already spread. It is such a mess I cannot fix anything I've done. The only place to go now is back to class just a ghost where he cries so well he’d put the others to shame if only he were real.
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The Despair Horse and Three, 1934 Dan Ivec I was still watching all this in my night truck when three blue horses walked slowly past. The last one carried a dead one that was like them. A bright blue horse that glowed in the dark. 'What is the matter with her, is she only sleeping?' the boy asked the horses as they awaited a sled-bus. 'She saw you get cruel and then she couldn't take it,' the tall one said in his ancient little voice.
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Oranges Imogen Forster A pile of cartons, neatly stacked in this café. The words “Nefertiti Oranges, Elwadi Export Co, Egypt” printed on one side. In the centre a rudimentary image of the queen in profile, haughty and long-necked. Her nibbled ears are smooth, her headdress precisely balanced, solid and flat-topped, just as it is in the octagonal green-painted room in a far corner of that museum in Berlin where we peer at her in a glass case, daring to look her in her one good and one blind eye. Which is more remarkable, that after more-than-centuries, the dynasties of Upper and Lower Egypt, and the long-gone Roman painters of those sweet sad portraits – a man, a woman, a child whose features you might see on any street-corner in Alexandria – she should be instantly recognisable on a crate?
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Or that in spite of everything we’ve heard about Egypt, the Elwadi Export Co. should be a going concern, reliably filling wholesale orders for fruit that a young woman lobs by the handful into a big juicer? As if the crude trademark – printed in an ink-fumed shop somewhere in Cairo -might in fact be the queen’s ka, accompanying her in our world, keeping her supplied with fresh oranges.
The Big Bucks Frederick Pollack I’m off to see everything. A plain in Burma with hundreds of spindly temples that are all façade; prayer, I suppose, means showing up. In Petra, Jordan, the grandest façade, well-named “the Treasury.” In the Balkans, cafés where corpses were and will be again. My tickets are my retinas. I will see airports, which in their often strained attempts at sameness are the true promise of happiness, the best critique of freedom and my real vacation.
I’ve just a few things to tidy up. Things = screens. My private assistant has remained in the dark office to help. She wears between her breasts the stylized flame of Zoroastrians. Though my own predilections are more broadly Gnostic, I respect her constant worried weighing of absolutes, and never hit on her, and ooze mentorhood. My driver will see her home to save her from the night and cruel gangs of monotheists, nihilists, and pragmatists.
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The final vital document concerns stories. It bets my reputation and that of the firm on their enduring niche. Though Lord Rama has fled, and the armies of Hanuman the Monkey King, perversely serving good, have become as fossilized a myth as monkeys, newly-scripted puppets again may prance behind the shadow-screens, and something must be told around the fires that light the world. I press Enter. Epic flows bear my signature. Then I lean back, not eager to leave. The plane will wait since it’s mine. I look out at the city at my level, the offices, studios ... What might be a person plunks what could be a piano. What we all do for capitalism, I don’t know – my job is the Big Picture – but we all add something to its manic garbled story. Meanwhile my dear Miss Ashtarte, praying against the hazards of sex tourism, lights a fire in what may have been an ashtray in the days of paper files on other worlds. We watch it die. I smell a sweet incense and, faintly, her, and secretly admit I love the adulation in her eyes. Insofar as anything can be seen in this room lit only by the bounding, soft
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 pastels of bar graphs, winking LEDs, those reassuring abstract waves of money. And klieg lights, and explosive rays from Martian war machines we put out there to distract folks from broken glass, their empty almost imageless days, their dead and rising seas.
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It All Comes To Siege Jake Reynolds The elegant ankle bone ran the castle, the sock flagged the turret, the voices, windy with a drawbridge jaw, yawning for a lap time. The thunderclap bone-crack, a pistol, a haughty flare flashing open boats in seas or moats with mean agendas revolted. Portcullis, tessellated, thatched iron waffle, drew down as the lever of this morning’s toaster, on its barb, the first shoe. The castle eroded, and what a lap, what a siege, what a way to breathe the foggy words ‘three fifty-nine’, the second shoe at the finish line at four minutes, the arrow-slit target, fat leather tongue, dry, waxless, no varnish, no princely reputation to tarnish, only a herd of murmurs, a school of bows and arrows tangled in the laces, the knows and don’t-knows of two newly crowned faces. Across, over, under, loop.
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Dreaming with a dead recording Katharina Dixon-Ward I recognised you. I’ve never seen you. “A press conference in Berlin. Tarantino and a literary assistant.” Upward jolt, slipper feet, begin my search for you: as I yank open draws the clothes are patchwork waterfalls, that pool around my toes. I skim for doll shaped flotsam finding none. Hug-armed, I haul cupboard from wall; poke through spider traps you buzz away. I hear you. Can’t catch you. Louder now and less fragmented “a vulture descends what does that mean?” 04:32 AM Through real eyes I realise; the room is greyscale and dully tangible. Unhook headphones and curl up like an ear. Everything passes Everything fades Everything palls Let go.
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On Herons’ Wings
(for Iain Sinclair)
the forlorn
James Bruce May
faces of the few waiting to confess, I had to walk the rest of the way to
the warm dry graves in the floor. I
your place from Victoria. The rain
tried to hear my footfalls, dull atop
clumped beneath my Cons and left
those graves. I tried to hear a wick
my footprints to follow. I stopped
waver amongst the quiet candles. I
at the cathedral, I don’t know why.
saw stained glass windows darken
When I climbed the cold stairs, the
the day’s clean light. I finished my
puddles prevailed, and proof of my
circuit at the heavy donation boxes
standing slipped smooth from the
and was about to go when
pavement in unbroken reflection. I a choir
pushed the door.
began to practise. A boy between I don’t usually
each man sang Handel or Elgar or
go into churches. That’s something
somebody. The rich harmony they
my dad would have done. It could
struck was effective, and I waited
be genetic or just a legacy. He left
for a moment to listen. The voices
an awareness of architecture and its
fell against pillar and arch, echoed
magnetism, his curiosity to have a
through cool air empty above aisle
wee nose. But once inside, I felt out
and pew. I shivered, wondering at
of place; an intruder. I stepped into
the acoustics of gold.
dim light, gleaming shadow, taking in the glinting mosaics,
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From there No one looked
the rigid power station spoke again in
as I left blinking into the bright wet
yesterday’s colour. From there the sea-
day. A homeless man sold damp Big
gulls circled both banks. From there I
Issues in the square. He was ignored,
wondered at the sky, its cold depths so
breathing in the rain that stuck to his
vague. Then a bird flew from beneath
teeth, stuck to his ruined coat, stuck
the bridge; a heron, alone, went tracing
to his hair, to his ruined magazines.
the Thames with its straight wings out
I passed him, followed by footprints stretched, its loop-neck loose, feathers that slipped silent from the pavement , and walked towards the river
trying
grey as the day.
From there I watched
to stay close to the buildings, to stay
it go, past the gulls, alone, rare, or less
dry, heading south, heading towards
common; an outsider. I watched it go
yours. But then on Vauxhall Bridge I
‘til it was lost to London. At Vauxhall,
stopped to peer into the water below.
people held umbrellas. A man held my
The day’s grey stretched all about me. gaze as if I had something to hide, but The tube had masked it, tall Victoria narrowed it, but from there it unfurled into all available space, wide as a web ‘cross the mouth of a cave.
as I came closer to yours, I wasn’t sure I had anything at all. The solitary heron, upriver by now, had drawn from me all that was left of my imagination.
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Contributors Isla Anderson has previously been published in Words Dance and Adroit (amongst others). She was commended in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2013. Her first chapbook will be published by Vademecum Magazine later this year.
Jared A. Carnie is currently enjoying the freedom of the Outer Hebrides. He
can be found at prettyneet.wordpress.com. He will be reading at the Inverness Book Festival in August.
Katharina Dixon-Ward has been published in The Cadaverine and founded a
school literary magazine. She has been a winner of various competitions including the Buxton, Enfield, Red House and Ilkley and was long-listed for the Tower Poetry Competition.
Imogen Forster is a translator, mainly of art history, from French, Spanish,
Catalan and Italian. She has published poems on-line and on paper. She's @ForsterImogen on Twitter, and information about her translation activity can be found at www.imogenforsterassociates.co.uk.
Dan Ivec was born on June 8th, a date which also marks the death of Hans Leo Hassler. Hassler built an organ which was eventually purchased by an Emperor. He was also married to Cordula Claus.
Nina Lewis is a Midlands based Performance Poet. She has work published
in various magazines and anthologies. Her website iswww.awritersfountain.wordpress.com. She will be performing with Brainfruit Poetry Army this summer.
James Bruce May read Creative Writing at Greenwich University and Goldsmiths College in London. Twitter: @james_bruce_may
http://jamesbrucemay.blogspot.co.uk
Mark McKee is from the American south. In his spare time he collects
nervous breakdowns. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eyeshot, theNewerYork, Icebox, and others. You can find him at goodreads.com/markmckeejr.
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Fred Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both published by Story Line Press. He is Adjunct professor of creative writing George Washington University
Bethany W Pope's first poetry collection, A Radiance was published by
Cultured Llama Press last June. Her second collection, Crown of Thorns, was published by Oneiros Books this August. Her first chapbook The Gospel of Flies was released by Writing Knights Press in February 2014. Her third collection Persephone in the Underworld has been accepted by Rufus Books and shall be released in 2016.
Jake Reynolds studies English Literature with Creative Writing at UEA. Jane Roberts is a freelance writer living in Shropshire, UK. She has been published in magazines, ezines and anthologies – including: “Subtext” (2009), “100 Stories for Haiti” (2010),“New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan” (2012),“Dark Clouds by Collective Unconscious” (2013), “Stories for Homes” anthology (2013), and NFFD Anthology "Eating My Words" (2014). She has been long-listed for Fish Publishing Flash Fiction 2013, Shortlisted for Bridport Prize Flash 2013, Winner of Writers' and Artists' Flash Fiction 2013. Shortlisted for National Flash Fiction Day Micro Fiction 2014. Twitter: @JaneEHRoberts / janeehroberts.wordpress.com
Charlotte Stevens is a London based lawyer and aspiring poet. You can follow her on Twitter @CEGStevens.