By Martin Cromie

My father’s big hands raise me by the oxters

pitching me across the pad-locked gate

to where the rut-scarred lane is barely seen

between the unkempt walls of gorse and fern.

By Alistair Noon

There is an island where they’ll kill

the visitor who strides ashore.

It seems to be the people’s will.

It seems to be the natural law.

By Seán Carlson

Three pints in, pleasantries

spill an apology:

Sorry if I offend—

but still we think of boats,

as if hulls carved of tree

alone, adrift, at sea.

By Matt Bunk

And Idaho was a golden blaze where I held my grief

The flowers that could not be picked

Roots I could not pull

Text and images by David Rubenstein

She looked up from the turnip she was inspecting, not understanding.

By Matt Haw

With the warm drystack 

of refuge at my back I watch 

two roll-on / roll-off ferries 

pass in the summer dusk 

By Olga Żmijewska

Until 1990, up to the age of 8, I grew up in the village of Idzbark in western Masuria. This former territory of the German province of East Prussia became known as the Recovered Lands (Ziemie Odzyskane) after the Second World War.

By Rachel Turney

Covid was a strange time in all of our lives and stranger still if you were an outsider somewhere. In 2021, I was in Bogota, which is a beautiful city, and as you can see from these photographs there are mixed feelings about tourism and foreign people living there.

By Maria Boghiu

On the last day of the writing workshop, after reading my short story, the gentleman sitting on my right looked at me as if I’d just appeared out of thin air. How old was I when I moved to Britain, and had I learned English growing up, and how old was I when I first started learning the language, he wanted to know.

By Val Murray

I regularly walk along footpaths near my home in Bramhall, Greater Manchester. Humans have walked here from Bronze Age herdsmen and Roman soldiers through to farm workers and modern leisure walkers.

By Alex Haft

The clouds moving as little bits god’s spit when they're far away in the panorama of silence; beyond the ridge of snowcapped mountain, a long black arrow at the top,  them moving forward like clipper ships fast behind. 

By Eleanor Hill

Trespass can be many things. It can be an act of protest by a crowd, speaking with feet. It can be an act of transgression against a fellow human or creature.

By Andrew Kyriacos-Messios

Lisbon sprawled below us bounded by a golden flowing coastline and cut through by the broad and shimmering Tagus.

By Amy Tryphena

I cycle to the byway, one of the access points to Carrine Common, to find the gate locked. I see intrepid travellers before me have worn an alternative path over the hedged bank.

By JLM Morton

I carried the wild with me on nights spent in the medieval woods of Estcourt Park, an estate which had been the setting for a now demolished country house and the seat of the Estcourt family since the early fourteenth century.

By Julia Bennett

A sunny winter’s day on the English coast, just north of Liverpool. The wide, sandy beach and coastal path are busy with family groups taking advantage of the good weather.

By Barry Smith

You Are Now Exposed To Imminent Personal Danger From Experiments In This Chamber Which You Have Already Affected.

Please Return To The Mine Entrance Without Delay  

By Tom Branfoot

Who decides whether a field is worthy of remaining, either as arable, common land or a green space at all?

By Fiona M. Jones

Whose woods these are I think I know, or at least whose woods these were, but the river flowing down below cares not whose land is whose, not yet whose trees are these and whose are those.

By Daniel Addercouth

I’d never have discovered the Paradox Club if I hadn’t sold my university textbooks to a dealer in Aberdeen’s warehouse district. I was walking home with my empty rucksack on my back, mourning the end of my academic career, when I saw a middle-aged couple emerge from a door beneath a railway arch.

By Gen Sandalls

I enter the flock’s habitat, to note a mixed group of corvids scattering at my approach, lifting up like a ragged black cloak roused by the wind. The birds are taking no chances.

By Marcel Krueger

I struggle with getting older. Not in an expensive-motorbike-and-young-mistress-type midlife crisis, but with the strange effects of time and nostalgia that only seem to amplify the older I get.

By Anna Polonyi

There’s a Hungarian version of King Lear I grew up with: an old, short-tempered king summons his three daughters to ask how much they love him. The two eldest vie to outperform each other with flowery language, but the youngest simply says: “I love you as much as salt itself.”

by Clarisse Van Kote

I am standing in line at the gate, waiting to board my connecting flight. There are no direct flights between New York and Lyon, it is always a two-step journey in the dance between my countries, long hours spent in various European city airports.