Sandra Kolankiewicz:”I can’t write of the oceans
without seeing that landmass of
plastic swirling in the Pacific,
bigger than Pitcairn Island

Claire Crowther: ‘Is seriousness a growing problem for outdoor bowls? There is studying opponents, calling to officials and denigrating bagger totals. St John in Revelation warns that those elders who survive a plague do not repent of their fornications. Where are you?’

Michael Buckingham Gray: ‘He leads her through the glass doors to a table and sits her down. Fetches her a cup of coffee and makes himself one too. Swings by his desk and slips a blank sales contract under his arm. Then returns to the table and is about to sit down when another salesman walks by and asks him where the manager is.’

Lydia Unsworth: ‘I swallow myself to sleep―on trains, in soon-to-be-demolished houses by the sides of rails. I raise my arm at the steamy driver, her eyes and the things we train them to deter. They say a foolish death is a happy one, that she who looks both ways has an excess of empty time.’

Tom Lowenstein: ‘Landlocked I remain, balanced uncertainly in the margin,
but still facing outward to some theoretically out of reach infinity.’

Georgia Wetherall (from ‘The Smokers Club’): ‘The man brought a pipe to our table and asked me what flavour I liked. I said something fruity. With or without tobacco? With, I tried to say, but my dad interrupted and said without.’

Stephen Wiest: ‘…the unknowing is how we live
Keeping us alive by asking or accepting
Until it kills us all’