Basic Space
Editor’s Note: Basic Space is the runner up of the Hilary 2020 500 Words Competition. Judge Natalie Haynes writes regarding the piece that it “shows enormous potential and is probably the best piece of writing at a sentence-level”. “Psychoanalysis is about what two people can sa
Dreaming
Editors’ Note: Dreaming is the winner of the Hilary 2020 500 Words Competition. Judge Natalie Haynes writes that the piece “combines a wonderful clarity and a capacity to illuminate an ordinary scenario: the imagination has created something incisive, emotional and warm.” Tonight
Stockholm Syndrome
we captured the city / persuaded the morning to wait / not to dawn / or betray us / or tread on our shadows just yet now we are alone / but entrapped is a bat in the net of your wings / these have managed somehow to regenerate we captured the towers / […]
Unwitnessed Extinction
One December afternoon in 2017, Hernán Bedoya was riding his horse to the vet in Chocó, Colombia when two men on motorcycles rode up to him and shot him fifteen times. Bedoya, who was a life-long community leader and land rights activist, was allegedly assassinated by a far-right paramilitary grou
Dialogue
It’s easy enough to get in-between things, easy enough to see you sway in the library corridor between your shadow and the rainy window I sway in the library corridor between my shadow and the rainy window, when it comes up in a quiet moment, the current hitting the backs of my knees and you’re
In Conversation with Sarah Mardini
“The boat started taking in water and the engine turned off. The boat was just a little dinghy. I jumped in the water, and my sister joined me; we had to use all the swimming resources that we had. It was a very rough sea that day. But I’m a long-distance swimmer, and I knew I could […]
Revenge of the Muse
Near the end of the Tate Modern’s Dora Maar retrospective, the largest so far in the UK, there is a recording of a conversation between the eighty-seven-year-old Dora Maar and Francis Morris, now head of the Tate Modern. In the conversation, originally recorded for the Tate’s 1995 Picasso retros
Quicklime
They froze Frieda in quicklime; They did it in front of a mirror, always inspired by the glass screen. Screams, screams! Everybody leans in for a peek. Quicklime, and her hands move fast; motion freezes faster with skin-fizzing bubbles. Actions pass, and her shape turns calcite-white and solid still
Blight
A tangle of growing things filled your belly: made your shrinking stomach bulge. Strings turned taut; drawn across each bend and curve now struck bare. Arid, audible – a space between each branch yawning. Fissure in the breeze. Chewed or gnawed: your fraying edges expanded the light between yo