Creative Writing

Fluorescence It’s not the passing of seasons that I mourn, The way the swallows sing just out of earshot, The way I turn my head like a lost child  Searching      for that last piece of hope. It’s the way everyday drives the wedge deeper. I pace in silence and the walls shrink, I say these words and all expectation is destroyed, I’m sorry, I always get the timing wrong, You said it ruins the moment.  I’m sorry. You turned the page, yet, I’m still writing on this one. You put on a coat,  every new winter,  that I’ve never seen, The years...

By Lena Zeller CW: Mentions of self-harm and suicide The thorns always come first.  I can feel them growing under my skin weeks in advance. But inside me they could still be anything. Could be nothing. Could be cancerous.   They don’t hurt before they pierce flesh. They only incubate. Some twinges here and there. Growing pains. Contractions. Nausea, every time I touch where I think one may be.   I am not supposed to pull them out to get it over with faster.   I drink a cup of herbicide every morning.   I always think I know when they will cut through skin. I never do.   I collapse on the floor of the grocery store like a child throwing a tantrum. I forget people can see me. The whole world is sharp and my body is the whole world. &nb...

that my love will not follow you, nor leap ahead, will have always been where you walk, will soften step by step  how it will receive your drifting heard, will be the scratchy fabrics and the splinters, will go down like pocket candy or sour wine  will have stretched around the globe before I was an egg in my mother’s mother’s womb, will outlive my hands and mouth  how all my dreams are love letters to you who lie unseeing. and all my teeth are pearls for you to pry loose one by one, from behind the soft oyster of my tongue  that when the tide turns for a final time and sinks the moon to sea, I will have loved you down to its depth and back up again A poem by Lena ZellerImage: The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo

Written by Ruby Saggers Associate Creative Writing Editor Image via Unsplash by Sandra-Beatrice Molnar July 21st 1311 I am walking, feeling awfully childlike as I observe – take it all in. It is summer, and I am warm. This longing, yearning for that incandescent celestial body hanging above me to shine brighter than it has done all year – it is gone. Yes, I adore the beauty of it. The leaves are a gorgeous green, I could eat them! But they lack the crunch, the browning as though left to crisp atop a fire. I want to feel the corners between my toes, brushing the crumbs off as they stick to my planta pedis. Autumpne is calling to me, I desire it. October 11th 1311 My goodness, I made it through the summer! Sweat to shiver, green to hazel, soft to crunch. The crunch hath co...

By Lena Zeller TW: Graphic description of eating disorders Fingers are the most useless part of the body. Splintering against the second row of teeth, if not the first. Getting stuck in places you don’t want them. If you’ve ever seen a seagull choke on a piece of plastic, you’d get what I mean. Barely anything to chew on, fingers.  I don’t know where they go when my mouth recedes to one neatly hinged jaw and thirty-two teeth. The splinters. The first time it happened I choked on my own tongue. Watching blood and bones and chunks of meat splatter the pavement. Feeling my throat split and shred. Hunched over, rocking in a corner, wiping bile from my mouth. Comforting, the smell of bile in that moment. I wasn’t quite aware of the killing yet then. Too busy processing the e...

Written By Ruby Saggers Associate Creative Writing Editor Image via Unsplash by Samet Kurtkus There are certain things staring at me, making me feel insignificant. So small. The things that I collect as I pull myself through another week – the receipts, the little orange vintage books, the oat milk stickers, the toilet paper stuck to a shoe, frantically waving my foot around to avoid the looks and the “HAH, she has toilet roll stuck to her!” Somehow, a small accumulation of bits and bobs seem to me far more significant than I, myself, may be. Who on earth am I to say that my towering over these little things makes me significant, and worthy of throwing these things away? When I have done little more than write in my silly little books and ponder over the silly (though rather ...

You’re sat there looking at me, whilst I look at myselfIn the mirror rested on my vanity;You’re merely the audience,Watching the staring competition between myself, and my reflection.There’s a certain look in my eye- one that you assume is self-admiration,But that must mean you have never been in this situation before,Otherwise you would see the difference betweenGlinting, excessive pride, and glossy, tearful eyes.So before you jump to conclusions, saying that I am vain,And self-obsessed,And can’t stop looking at myself, for long enough to see you looking at me,There are a few things you should know:When I paint my lips pink, it isn’t to make myself pretty,It is to trap the poisonous words of hatred that ‘playfully’ tease meAfter they see the unrecognisable reflection of me without makeup...

Ruby Saggers - Associate Creative Writing Editor I believe I deserve to be vain. After years of misfortune and tribulation. To be seen by your seniors as a worthless Horrid Mess of a Girl from a Low-income house- Hold. They held onto that. I held onto it. The contention that I could not achieve because I did not have a warm space to ruminate on my future, my education, my vision as an academic. Though I knew what I wanted. Being forced into bottom sets as a result of the preconceived notion that I cold not – would not – meet the same end goal as my peers made me… it made me. It made me want more. And so, I did more. Now I sit in nineteenth century elation Staring at the dust on books I used to dream about having access to. Those w...

Ever since I was a child, I told myself I wasn’t interested in politics, Even as I sat there whilst my mother watched the news on the tv. I paid no mind to those speaking, nor to the meaning behind their words Because ignoring the world’s chaos meant a life lived in carefree ecstasy. But growing up, meant growing into the world  And listening out for the everchanging ‘modern issue’, Realising that perhaps my ignorance didn’t allow for as much of an escape as I believed, Because that which impacts the world, must also impact me too. I think about those of you fighting in the gender battle: Sisters, brothers, siblings, lovers- all of you, my family. And I’m overwhelmed with survivors’ guilt, as I sit in safety and watch them die. I’m sorry that you...

By Ruby Saggers - Associate Creative Writing Editor ’When robins appear, loved ones are near’ There was something in the orange that day. Modern grief, it seems, is to “cast thy nighted colour off!” Celebratory drinks and fruitful colour in memoriam, thus I am no Hamlet. I had spent July through to August in solitude, finding it difficult to move through the stages. The list of bereavement: Denial, Ang- No. I am yet to succumb to blame. Denial. It is all I could feel. ‘It is gone five p.m., where is __? He must be coming home soon.’ Watch him walk through those doors, waiting for his cuppa splodge to sip on. It went cold that day. I am stuck in the first stage of lamentation, and I have been this way for eight hundred and eleven days. Malleable br...