Under His Skin
I don’t think he knows I’m here, embedded in his dermis. We ended things in a typical rage: “God, you get under my skin!” And I said what now seems to me the line which sealed my fate: “You’d be so lucky!” And, the next morning, I came to, and there I was. Don’t get […]
Rubber Fire
Horizon catches the cap of our neighbour’s fire oiling gashes through wood floorboards spiked with old plimsolls. The deadliness is in the sunsink behind the flames: in things suspended there is so much space quivering from absence into being. Strange faith. I tap your shoulder to ma
because my mother’s best friend is catholic
today it seems the missionaries are bound to send their best-disguised recruit – the tickle of hair on your top lip better found at the wheel of a Ford F-150, camo drying on the boot, but filters the word of G-d to a tinny sound a frequency between carrie underwood and orchestral flute, cou
Crawling Order
forget about hands and knees– his chest is on the ground. he is flattening himself like sourdough naan as men in hats stand sentinel and impatient. this procedure takes all day he is heaving his bones–elbows bear the weight of stomach, ribcage, legs for the distance of one hundred and fif
Drifting Bridge
You are up on the bridge, my friend. You used to deliver heavy household equipment all over the country— hands of leather, moving like silk. One morning, many years ago, you blew into my house on a wood-violet breeze and landed inexplicably in the kitchen doorway. The setting sun spans the valley
Telling with my eyes
This piece was originally written by the hugely influential Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa. Despite his many contributions to Japanese literature, his work is seldom translated into foreign languages due to his ascetic values which kept it hidden from the public eye. This piece is an attempt to intro
Mimicry
Mimicry She stoops to worship Mimicry, old, borrowed and belly-full of what has already been the start and end of ideas. She rewrites Genesis with a stale bible; a tea-ringed, deadened […]
The Isis Podcasts: In Conversation with William Boyd
Join The Isis for a conversation with the award-winning novelist, screenwriter and critic, discussing Boyd’s journey to becoming a writer, his years at Oxford, pulling off infamous hoaxes and his new novel Trio, published this October. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1TzLm
Winner of the TT20 500 Word Competition
There was a magnet perching on the fridge which listed the moment of sunset for every single Shabbos of that year, but still she liked to weigh with her own hands its old and sore refrain. She had laid out the candle and the wine and five filmy pouches crammed with spicy cloves onto the […]