‘To keep her eye on the cost, our mother set the clockwork oven-timer ticking when she picked up the phone.’
My father drowned when I was five years old. A picture of me, framed in gold plastic, was fished from his pocket and returned to my mother with a soggy wallet and a bunch of keys. The keys were to our new terraced house, now paid for with his life insurance.
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘It was by necessity, not choice.’
Ralf Webb on returning to the West Country.
‘Sometimes, in the shower, he finds new and surprising bruises, whose origin he can’t place.’
A story by Niamh Donnelly.
‘Refusal is the last recourse of the powerless.’
Marina Benjamin on her years of not eating, and not growing.
‘Black was thrown / in all directions.’
‘Even when I travel as far as India, you are with me and I am re-entering our cellar.’
Memoir by the poet Pascale Petit.
‘I hope to hear the spirit of my mother’s native pessimism faintly pass through a line of translated poetry’
Poetry from Eve Esfandiari-Denney.
