issue four
WHAT’S INSIDE? Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom Passive, slant Thomas O’Connell The Consolation of Chaos Ruth Wiggins Your Move Turning a Page John Challis Dentistry Sophie Essex Untitled [x3] Mira Mattar Sparks Daniel Barrow Morality Tale Alice Wooledge Salmon On Shapely Sisters Avenue Jacqueline Smith Dinner with George Susan’s House Kirsty Logan Jermemiah Tobi Cogswell The Man Checks His Calendar and Schedules Contentment Sophie Mackintosh Stowaway Meg Pokrass Hardwood Rose Split Ends Ben Gilbert Shelley
JANELLE ELYSE KIHLSTROM Passive, Slant The way it was with her, was how she wanted it. The dagger sewn into her apron. You could say She wanted it that way, to paraphrase. Or say She sewed the dagger. Or say The moon burst through the door, its guns a-blazing. Say you pilfered someone’s only alphabet, and now you’ve come for the mechanics. While you
whisk the pancake batter, saucer-eyed. Say Tell me your disaster. Call it mine, my pet disaster. Furnish your scene with spindly women spinning wool beside the window, in a frame. Flash them the word disaster; watch the way their parched lips move. Now it’s your movie, where time creeps along, until some little horror drop its veil.
RUTH WIGGINS Your move It’s not so much that I’m lying Here, trying to sleep off a migraine It’s more that I’m waiting for you to come And wake me. Not with a cup of tea, But with what you sweetly assume to be Your secret agenda
RUTH WIGGINS Turning a page Every now and then you find, In a book, a page that’s thicker And you think it might be two, and so Spend ages trying to split them. To find the missing text, you thumb Your way around the edges, and When that fails, you lean in close and try To cleave them with blown kisses. You compare the last clause with the first And wonder what it all means, What once made sense, no longer does The page is spoilt by thumbprints. Till finally you fall upon the comfort Of page numbers, and confirm there are no Mysteries, no hidden depths to plunder He simply is, just a little, thicker than the others.
THOMAS O’CONNELL The Consolation of Chaos
Only false prophets, and telemarketers, call anymore. I pass the
hours removing fruit from a still life and lamenting the lies I thought of too late. Your car is in another driveway. The night is nearer than the morning; we are now free to be new animals. I blame the circus, insolent girls on bicycles,
voodoo drums in drugstores,
calliope music on the radio,
zebras reflected in the eyes of lions, moths and rust and flying saucers on the horizon.
Willows laugh behind my back; Wishful thinking produces
nothing but singing birds.
JOHN CHALLIS Dentistry The city has bad breath. From the sky it’s an open pie hole stretched too far. It’s lips are the thin white strands of the M25. We snuck in while it was sleeping. Stuck bridges in like braces across the Thames, the great dirty tongue stinking its own brand of menthol juices. Boats on the river are un-chewed foods anchored to the frenulum of the tongue. Builders are dentists, embalmers, reconstruction artists, pouring cement fillings into landfill, hoisted up as window cleaners mopping plaque from the stone. There isn’t a toothbrush big enough. Listed buildings are crooked statues of an oral surgeons gothic garden. Battersea power station is a wisdom tooth, Canary Wharf and the Gherkin two sharp fangs.
Parliaments’ the central incisors of the dependable bottom jaw. It’s definitely a British set of teeth.
SOPHIE ESSEX Untitled [1] Scribbled hearts and mine in bloom against a paper white backdrop. The forecast is heavy with the low and constant hum of traffic. Tonight time seems stable, unmoving and we equal its terms, with guttural breaths, the odour of rum. He swerves to avoid a collision, crashes through my emotions leaving me curled within myself. Inside the beehive I pocket the honey and later as he slips his hands inside me he’ll know what I know; that without the other there is no I. He recites lines from my favourite poems: coercion, subtle bribery. I’m powerless to genius and soft tones. I slither from my cocoon. From this angle the sky appears to shift, to travel through colour, to be something unfamiliar. If we lived in black and white, would the written word become meaningless? I tilt my body towards tentative lips, he feasts, and within millimetres the universe spins, sirens pierce through what had settled. The spaces between our bodies form a maze of trapeziums filled with every crowd we’ve been lost in together and this is perfection.
Untitled [2] The heat makes him that little bit sweeter, a touch clearer. It’s the way I imagine broken glass between the discoloured pages of science fiction novels would taste. Skin glimmers as though amber. We are entwined on a hillside watching the sun set into the sea. We talk of how each night the sea swallows the sun whole only to regurgitate the ball of fire many hours later. We contemplate reality. I only exist because he thought me up. On reflection he would craft me dragonfly wings, colour me mint green, my mother tongue would be French, my eyes translucent. He exists for me the way the sea only exists for nightfall. We search for the hidden door on the moon’s surface, rename the dead, fading stars, create new worlds that will one day crash into ours. He tightens his grip around my body. I imagine that if he squeezes a little harder my heart will break and in its place withering sunflowers materialise. Our motives are questionable, we are two bodies under sheets, we are indecipherable.
Untitled [3] We were years apart. He was subtle in the way he was forceful. ‘Listen kid’. Seeing those lips moving to address me: I could do nothing but listen. I always imagined them pursed against mine. I was young. Of course he was right but I wanted to learn from my own mistakes. More than that I wanted to make mistakes. ‘Don’t worry kid.’ But I did worry. I worried about words. The words forming in my head, stuttering their way out of me, the words they wrote. They called themselves poets. To me they were re-prints, cracked porcelain. ‘You’re the hollow moon, you’re yet to be revealed to the masses.’ He had games that I would never play. He was the ocelot hiding in Eden, I was the shiver down his spine and the quiet rebellion.
MIRA MATTAR Sparks Tara in her drop waist dress, silver sequins surprised with pink, streaming black feathers, opens the door whispering happy new year, kissing me on both cheeks and lips once. Last year’s Christmas tree sprayed green, throbs gold light over everybody; cigarettes glowing orange, pleasurable inhalations expose exhaling smiles, warm eyes, good will. Yvie, guitar in hand, we sang, this is the number one song in heaven, written, of course, by the mightiest hand. I’m apocalypse happy, I think as parma violet acid taste seeps into my tongue. Never like Blue Cheer and Windowpane so Tara wisely drops two. Soon her smile hostages her face, pupils black, round, full to burst and marble into the whites. Excited she whispers as I successfully dance in heels, I am definitely in favour of this party. Her fervour builds, her voice shouts, I am definitely in favour of everyone here. James Dean kisses her forehead. A Native American pours divine spirits down his and her throats. She is all of her selves; whispering, screaming, crouching, standing, dancing, embracing, kissing, talking so fast she collapses on the stairs, hands clasped together, held to her chest, eyes huge looking up at some demon possessing her with joy and poisonous fear of that same joy. Then face down screaming with increasing volume and foot stamping her heart breaks open with tears and sudden bliss. Like a champagne bottle shaken and popped she explodes, but instead of a bottle it was Tara and instead of champagne it was puke. Puke covers
the stairs, our coats, her dress, the collected works of Robert Frost, the bathroom, toilet and tub. Yvie scrubs the carpet with bleach and spritzes her expensive Christmas perfume over it but the smell holds true. People gather wide eyed at the stairs to see the show. Tara’s dress now in a puke covered heap at the foot of her red bed, some sparkles still showing through. She saw past, future and present, in analogue and digital in her eyes through lenses and screens and did not look away. I took my coat to the dry-cleaner a few days later, I held it to me, proud, with her vile magic all over it.
DANIEL BARROW Morality Tale It’s an exhausting job sometimes. By the time I caught up with the bear, it was stood, a towering, turgid black post, in between the pines, its trunk shaking as if being electrocuted. There were slashed claw-marks on the trees marking his progress, smashed branches, an owl on the floor with its quizzical face caved in. The condensation from its breath as it bellowed joined with the steam rising from its shoulders; it shook and twitched its snout furiously, from which a little blood trickled. I was stood behind the tree, wondering what my motivation was for being near the bear at this time of the morning. One only needs reasons in order to tell stories, something in which I have only a Sunday painter’s interest. Anyway, it was then I considered the cocaine. Empty Tupperware boxes – about the size for your husband’s lunch, say – piled and flung around the clearing, some miles back, where they had apparently fallen: a wellknown dumb-fuck of a smuggler had jettisoned them, before trying to parachute with a sack of blow the size of a small horse strapped to his chest. I imagined the bear getting more and more frantic as it got through the first ten, finding the taste acquired, perhaps, but eagerly, as if its body were guided by some other agency, clawing the next open for more. And, yes, there was an ending of sorts. Perhaps the bear died. Such, I always say, are the wages of sin.
ALICE WOOLEDGE SALMON On Shapely Sisters Avenue
Seb Jenkins’ succession of pithy films will, he’s sure, encapsulate Wandsworth just as The New Wave -- Rohmer/Truffaut/Godard and the rest -- has immortalised Paris. Emerging from his high-up flat in red brick and rendered Sisters Avenue, he’s breached the privacy behind lit bow windows of Avenue Mansions opposite, swept his lens over Royal Mail’s random elastics strewing footways, and chronicled the iron geometry of manhole covers from pear shapes to STANTON PLC WARRIOR shielding currents of Thames Water via squared-off
G G A S S
Seb has deleted a succession of pedestrians trudging with iPods in favour of provoking street interaction: beside Avenue Mansions’ stuccoed garden wall, he places a wooden chair, heaps the seat with salvaged Post Office loops, prints ‘free change’ on cardboard next to a coins-filled box, and priming his HD camera, discreetly waits. A youth gathers flowers in the Mansions’ garden, fastens stems with one of the red bands, and presents his bouquet to a passing girl. A skinhead chooses ten springies to run up each arm in order to equal his number of piercings. An elderly woman, gripping her cane, reads the sign, removes several crimson strips, adds a coin to the box, and pockets some ‘free change’.
There’s nothing further till a bloke appears with his ‘reth!nk rubbish’ recycling which he drops, bags filled to bursting, on to the kerb. After examining Seb’s display, he piles remaining elastics atop the coins, picks up the box, picks up the chair, and walks away. ‘Ye gods!’ cries Seb, who will miss the chair. He pans his camera towards the privet arch hugging a permits dispenser where the curve of Sisters meets abbreviated Thirsk, and notes that his sound should fade-in the clack-grumble Battersea-hoot of Clapham Junction trains.
JACQUELINE SMITH Dinner with George The agent, the publicist, his Vietnamese pot-bellied pig – all of them make this difficult – the girl fans, brazen in lip gloss and Juicy Couture, the paparazzi who ambush his immaculate dentistry on every boulevard, and we are so on/off there’s barely a flicker. But tonight he cooks for me – fajitas again, for he’s a one recipe kind of guy. He chops tomatoes and jalapenos for the salsa, grills strips of steak, pepper and onion, worries that guacamole is never enough. He makes a show of mixing a mojito. Too much like Tom Cruise? he asks, and I shrug, certain he’ll guess soon that I’m not Californian and that I don’t tan. Then he’s back on to basketball, how he shot hoops with the guys and could have been a contender, and he’s losing me – I could drift and forget the Maserati and his polished days of red carpet and canapés, his sculpted Armani to my pure flat pack. My wardrobe hides no hidden depths, but still he persists, and shows me an intense jaw, and as we work this union of air and stone, I feel a slow erosion, atom on atom, a lifting and settling of particles as I am slowly weathered to a new form.
JACQUELINE SMITH Susan’s House We drive to Susan’s house on the edge of town, out through a purgatory of Barratt homes and retail parks, loaded with a crate of Fosters and enough speed to break a coma. And there’s her semi, the end one with a sofa in the garden and suburban trains rattling past her bathroom window, taking commuters anywhere but here. The party’s already breaking up. It’s true that we love each other, she says, glass eyed to anyone who’ll listen as he, bare-chested, with a galaxy of crop circles tattooed over his shoulders, grinds his way through the last of her friends still drinking Lambrini dregs in the kitchen. We take Susan to bed, tuck her in, murmur a gentle psalm. We find him prowling the living room with enough loose ends to hang us all. O, Ave Maris Stella, he was good.
KIRSTY LOGAN Jeremiah Inside the front hall of the school, a girl stands with a brown leather satchel hanging loosely from one shoulder. A group of children surround her in a loose semi-circle, their breathing perfectly in sync though a little quicker than usual. The girl rummages through the bag and pulls out an object small enough to be hidden in her palm. She says something – a magic spell perhaps, or a prayer – and throws the object up as high as she can. The ceiling above the children’s heads is three storeys up. It is a curious layout, a space meant for a stairwell that was never built. Three dozen pairs of eyes watch the object flash up towards the glass ceiling above their heads. It does not reach, of course; the strength of one girl cannot send this item up three storeys. It falls and without ceremony explodes on the buffed white floor of the hall. The floor is no longer white. Now it is spattered with what had been contained in the girl’s fist. That’s him, the girl says. Now you have all met him.
The children stare at this new addition to their group. A moment ago none of them knew that the new addition was a he, but now they all silently name him: Noah, Copernicus, Winston; their favourite or least favourite of the characters in their history books. The girl prods at the new addition with the toe of her saddle shoe, being careful not to smear the delicate pattern he has made. Noah-CopernicusWinston gives no response. She takes a step backwards, out of the battleground, and stamps her heel. Still no response. Don’t be rude, Jeremiah, she says, and the other children slot that name in over the ones they had attached to him before. He has always been Jeremiah, and perhaps Jeremiah is rude, because he is not responding to the toe-prod or the heel-stamp or the dozens of eyes still peering at every shred of his being. Perhaps Jeremiah’s inner world is so vast – or so miniscule – that he does not need or understand this semi-circle of eyes. The girl sighs. Jeremiah will not play today, she says. She lies on the buffed floor of the hall, feeling the liquid seep into her grey wool dress, until Jeremiah has gone.
TOBI COGSWELL The Man Checks His Calendar and Schedules Contentment May I come see you this Thursday? I hate my wife, I want only to see your toes peeping out from beneath your black shoes, and your collarbones. I want to watch diamonds winking from your ears and your short hair pushed back, trace the line of your jaw with my finger, then kiss it, then hold it to your lips. Let’s have tea then unfetter the wine. I am poor in terms of funds but wealthy in love I will bring a small bottle, enough for one glass each. Let’s toast the quiet beauty of escape, our free hands poised softly on the table. Turn around, let me trace the zipper of your dress as it runs up your ridges
and crenellations, finally to the back of your neck, where small hairs whorl in a pattern of silent chaos. Let us butter some bread and have civil conversation I want to bask in the hush of you, the grace. To see you this Thursday, I know there is time.
SOPHIE MACKINTOSH Stowaway 1 I talk from the inside. Pulsating like an egg reaching its term. I think of this town I’ll be born into. And of my mother who never knew of me until thirty-three weeks had passed. I knocked my fists against her and she never heard me; the stowaway glazed with tallow, alien, wrapped in amnion like cellophane. I’m here I cried out. You don’t know me but I’m here. 2 I lay slow and silent at first, a slick of cells forming a nebula. I clung on to the sides of the wall and hoped to survive. All day I listened to her voice and knew not to make myself known, not yet. I curled myself small so that she wouldn’t show. Tenuous and shrimplike, inhuman, but loving her already. 3 I rock, seasick, in her stomach now. A minnow slipping in and out of blood. No more need to hide. She speaks back to me. Baby, oh baby, why
didn’t you tell me you were here sooner? I transmit answers down the cord. I did; you weren’t listening. She sighs and stretches, the clicking of her spine a popped echo in my ears. We’ll just have to make the best of it. Sore and dragged with heat, she rubs ice cubes on her stomach, the electric prickles of the too-tight skin. I feel the coolness against the crown of my head.
MEG POKRASS Spilt Ends Sometimes my hands felt as old as they really were. They were so icy, I put them around my neck to warm them. Or I put them around Soho, my cat. I had a real date that evening. My boyfriend Chuck was fine when he in Ohio, but in California he turned small and brittle, then lost his singing voice. He blamed it on cigarettes. He spent most evenings at The Full Cup, became pals with a skinny pink-haired bitch. He admired how confidently she wore leather everything, even shorts. I googled Sam Trexter, my date that I had met through a personal. He was a grouting professional, a “grouter.” I’d be meeting him later for sushi, and on the phone, we’d agreed to split the tab. Sam Trexter told me he had bright blue eyes, I could spot him across the room, which to me signaled colored contacts. Cleaning the cat litter, I crushed my knuckle. I went and stood in the garage near the ashes of my other cat, Herman. I still couldn’t bring myself to sprinkle. Chuck said I was wallowing. When we fucked, he’d grab my waist and
say “oooooh” and I’d try to ignore how my body wanted to run like a small, ruined rabbit. Gravity grabbed my body and made me compliant, but my mind was a leprechaun, jumped over greenery and escaped to the cool ground, somewhere clean. Afterward, I always took a teaspoon of emotrol to settle my stomach. It worked perfectly, though the pharmacist said it was just sugar and food coloring. The pharmacist knew my name, which made my day both better and worse. I felt known and welcome at Walgreens, as I might in a small town, but I felt like a loser for buying so much anti-nausea medicine. My cell phone clinked like the sound of two wine glasses toasting. The name Sam Trexter appeared on the screen: Here was a real person, telling me something. His voicemail said he especially loved Unagi. He probably thought I’d be impressed he ate eel. I already hated Sam Trexter, the sound of his name, the sharp sibilant sound of the “ext”, like a door slamming.
MEG POKRASS The Hardwood Rose Taylor, my former life-coach, had sexual dexterity, and so did I. Some day I’d be old and rickety and have only vague, dusty memories of athletic sex... and with my family’s luck, I’d be dead before then anyway. Since it was our honeymoon, I packed lots of Purell. My emotions were muted, which is why I hired Taylor to heal me. “Metamoments and other flickers of hyperactive thinking” Taylor called it, back when he was still my professional life-coach. Taylor was tied to his online world - often receiving an important ping or text right before I came - and I disliked it when he’d have to answer just then. At the Hardwood Rose Honeymoon Inn, no cell phones or blackberries or laptops were allowed. There was no cellular reception, which is why I chose it. It was the only Inn left in the state of California with no internet access. Their website said, “unhook your life and come back to heaven.” That’s what decided me, and though Taylor went into a tiny melt down the day I told him, I soothed him by running to the superstore and buying him the new Wii Fit which I couldn’t afford. On our honeymoon, there were no fake cricket ring tones - only our real
animalish sounds, echoing off the cedar walls - mimicking the smell of pork chops and champagne. Only a few times did I think about my dentist, Doctor Green. He was a good listener, would ask questions when I couldn’t speak, when my cheeks were stuffed with cotton. When Taylor came, Dr. Green (more than once) got stuck in my imagination. I thought about the dental suction instrument dentists used to extract saliva - a kind and practical solution to make a patient comfortable in an uncomfortable situation. But mostly, I remembered the way Dr. Green would blush and giggle like a boy when using his special instruments.
BEN GILBERT Shelley Blue lipped and arguing, we are house hunting, which I wish was literal, hats with flaps and whisky flasks, chubby little bungalow with creamy body in the binoculars sniffing a well kept lawn, bounding along, finds itself flung headlong above the dew bespeckled foliage through the bloodshot sunrise nursing night before in dulcet curses, woke up next to some clouds it didn’t know the name of and tiptoed behind them, whilst house dangles in a crude snare, hoops like the girl you once dated who wore ear rings so big circus animals could have jumped through them, a sprung for sale sign demise, that old story, single storey building seeks soul mate, looking sadly through its ten windows, the eyes of the soul, no lover but the new promiscuous, brutal patriarch, an eighteen stone hunk of pure Gilbert and his skinny son on initiation.
‘Got him pops!’ Swig, manly hugging, but it’s a sober affair under the crimson sky. Dad... measures up the new home the way an undertaker preps the coffins for stiffs, cheeks bulging with cotton wool, pencil lips made up, praying to some domestic demi God that smells of pot pourri for clemency so he can fit within the four walled remains all worldly things, but you see him counting other elements. The cost. How he is going to cram mercilessly his broken hearts piled high to the heavens in the musty oak beamed attic that moans with him, his hours of disappointments in the walk in wardrobe, his fifty four score years bulging in black bin liners which begin to erase themselves from memory the way a child an etch-a-sketch in melodramatic attempt to redress it’s lack of talent, to begin less ambitious projects a dog, or car. A house. Grandad in tow, forever vocal, tells us what’s the point of settling
down, I jest for all the kids I may not know about, he relays to me that the countryside is for pigs and farmers alone and for my information, marriage is a Chinese finger trap but he keeps squeezing his, her, until the shine pops out of those swollen jaded bridal eyes, whilst she nurtures things that can’t love her back like plants and birds but at least know the difference before she is gone. Spoiling for fight, it isn’t death that stalks that tragic couple, the gap toothed Italian idly thumbing her cross, disappointed stares at the fatally flawed cockney vampire, but boredom, the silent killer, the lack of commonality whittling the noose for flabby necks. And if this is your love, timeless love keep it. If this is devotion, I will wait until the sequel. A home, a marriage, a life, shouldn’t be prison or substitute. You won’t ever
need to fear me polishing your trophy wife, that isn’t my style. I’m more a roving reporter, asking the questions you haven’t got the guts for, like if I’m such a catch then why do all the girls wading in our mutual shallow end throw me back, claiming vegan lineage through those quicksand pupils, shifting all the time, left to right. And why don’t her knees buckle under the weight of this. My name isn’t short for benevolent or benediction, but my surname in French means ‘bright promise.’ I will make you one right here, right now. My soul can’t tether me to the Earth however rich the soil but I will grow, out of my shell, through these converted barns I will burst my head through the roof meteoric
and I love you but I won’t ever be like you pops, with your baggage, nor will this home be different. My sofa does not define me. I will not be remembered for my bewitching combination of raffia mats. Not will I be a sum of my mistakes and loves I never chased. This home, They will take it away from me again. Like they took the money and the girls and the good wine. Ivory thighs come from endangered species, those candle lips? They’ll burn out before the wax was hot enough to seal our deal. It isn’t about the girls or the homes or the demons hanging over us. It’s about survival in style. These homes you chase, they are just graveyards waiting for names, details. You are a monolith. A living legend.
You are my Dad. So let me let you in to a little secret about what I know about permanence. Today, I am a one man legacy, a self sufficient drink they will neck down to the last milky drop. My body can’t be buried, it’s a red dwarf seen through telescope eyes years after death, a mellow irrelevance. A kaleidoscope of colours that heightened infatuation, that gave them house worth worshipping for all the stories not objects, that I will accomplish. And my brain? Well my brain is the monster I will build and build to terrify the villagers.
OUR LOVELY CONTRIBUTORS Daniel Barrow’s fiction has been published in the anthology ‘Vertigo of the Modern’ and his poetry has appeared in ‘Tapfactory’ and at ‘Horizon Review’. He writes regularly on music and books for a variety of places. John Challis’ poems have appeared in the Wild Women Press anthology ‘The 3am Club’ and ‘Citizen 32’ magazine. BBC Manchester once described John’s poems as ‘raw & sensual’. He is one half of theatrical construction team Bubble & Squeek and co-founder of music and literary night Trashed Organ. John also reviews poetry for digital literary compendium Hand & Star. John blogs at http://keyholesurgery.blogspot.com/. Tobi Cogswell is a Pushcart nominee and co-recipient of the first annual Lois and Marine Robert Warden Poetry Award from Bellowing Ark. She has three chapbooks and her full-length poetry collection “Poste Restante” is available from Bellowing Ark Press. She is the co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.sprreview.com). Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom lives in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., where she received an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University in 2008. Her poems and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including Gargoyle, elimae, Arsenic Lobster and Lines & Stars, and her electronic chapbook was published by blossombones. She edits the online journal Melusine. Sophie-Marie Essex lives in the Leicestershire countryside and has had work previously published within New Horizons and The Delinquent. She maintains a simple website at www.sophie-marie.co.uk where you can obtain her poetry chapbook Unspoken Words. Ben Gilbert was born in Cambridge, the mobile phone theft crime capital of Britain, but is desperate to shake its image from these roots of depravity and impoverishment to something more scholarly and socially acceptable. When he isn’t moving home or dog sitting in order to evade and pay his creditors respectively, he can sometimes be found pretending to be French with improbably long cigars in the pitiful hope of forging largely ephemeral romances with girls who ultimately always know better. He can sometimes by found battling hecklers at Trashed Organ, armed with a can of cider and witty verse.
Kirsty Logan is a writer, editor, teacher, grad student, waitress, and general layabout. She lives in Scotland with her girlfriend, who is slightly less of a layabout. She holds a MLitt (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Glasgow University. Kirsty’s writing is in print or upcoming in Word Riot, PANK, elimae, Wigleaf, Popshot, Polluto, .Cent, and others. Sophie Mackintosh is a student and occasional struggling musician. She has been previously published in Pomegranate webzine, had a short story anthologised, and has been recorded by Poetcasting.co.uk (mumbling the whole time). Mira Mattar is a tutor, freelance writer and reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and other publications. She is also one third of Monster Emporium Press. You can read her at http://hermouth.blogspot.com/ Thomas O’Connell is a librarian living in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. His poems and stories have appeared in Caketrain, Sleepingfish, and Noo Journal, as well as other print and online journals. Meg Pokrass’s first full length collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” (Press 53) will be out Feb. 2011. She recently co-authored “Naughty, Naughty” a book of flash fiction. Currently, Meg serves as as as Solicitations Editor for SmokeLong Quarterly and runs the popular “Fictionaut Five” author interview series for Fictionaut. Meg has published over one hundred stories and poems in magazines like: Mississippi Review, Gargoyle, Gigantic, elimae, The Nervous Breakdown, Necessary Fiction, Storyglossia, SoMa Lit. Review, Everyday Genus, Night Train, Juked, Pindeldyboz, Women Writers, and the Istanbul Review. Story links and writing prompts can be found here: http://www.megpokrass.com Alice Wooledge Salmon, an American in London, writes about Paris, New York, and her adopted city, in fact and fiction, variously published in Britain and the USA. Her most recent UK writings have appeared in The PN Review, The Guardian, Stand, Pen Pusher, Red Ink, Iota, The Frogmore Papers, and elsewhere. Jacqueline Smith lives in London and works as an interviewer. She has previously been published in Ambit and South Bank Poetry. When Ruth Wiggins is not writing poetry and fiction she likes taking photographs of women who dress up as super heroes: http://www.myspace.com/wwoa
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Images probably came from Sam issue four - September 2010 ISSN 2044-0111