On my first day in the case room a fellow apprentice compositor had spilled a case of 9 point Palace Script. The letters lay in a big pile. The foreman called me over. ‘It could happen to a bishop’, he said gleefully. He dismissed the other apprentice and turned to me. ‘Now I want you to pick up the letters one by one and put them in your compositor’s stick. Then I want you to put back in the case each letter in the right place. I’ll check back on you tomorrow or the next day’, he giggled. The small ornate letters were hard to make out. The heavens had given him an opportunity to break me in and take my place with the others who were in for the long haul. He was a diminutive man and we had clashed earlier when he was leading me down the long corridor to the case room. He said ‘you’re too tall for your age’. I replied, ‘maybe you’re too small for your age’.

fallen silent
ensnared in letters –
the forty year pension

‘I won’t be in today, my mother died last night’. There was no grieving. Feelings were buried. We just got on with things. I wore a black badge on my sleeve to show I was in mourning. My eldest sister took over cooking the dinners. One lunch time I went back to the empty house. There was nothing to eat, just an onion. I ate the onion and went back to work. One of the older men came up to me. The smell of onion hit him. He recoiled. I was embarrassed. I said I was eating onion flavoured chewing gum. He called over the other men to get a whiff. They laughed at the idea of onion flavoured chewing gum. I insisted. I didn’t want them to know there was no food at home.

at night I searched
every hidden place-
I could find nothing

Gerry McDonnell

noisy carrefour
our conversations drown
in the melee

deep blue eyes sweaty skin shining pectorals summer heat lashing out young lust

a lifetime later

salt and pepper emotional quotient intellectual wordless conversations silent wars cerebral love

just the sound
of tinkling windchimes
logical moon

Mona Bedi

Rules, I hate them
and they should die.

Kati Mohr

* https://www.houseofstaunton.com/special-moves

I’m waiting. No post for a day or two so perhaps there’ll be something.  I’m not expecting much but you never know. I’ve heard of letters arriving decades after they were posted. The road remains blank as an unwritten page. Just a pale space between ruled dark lines . Then suddenly it comes past the window before you can say Miss B with her blackboard rubber. One of those slates where the chalk makes a sound that can put your teeth on edge. She was writing some sums and the next moment she was there by the window pointing. It all  comes back like one of those missives arriving from over the years as clear as black and white.

first swift
a high pitched squeak
lost on the wind

Diana Webb

Outside yet inside the place for supplies, it offered the food of a different nature. I circle-danced round it at sight of a celandine, the season’s first bluebell in chimes of assent through the soil beneath. A live singing sculpture with bird notes through veins in the sheen of its copper. But now I hear years of creation unsung and unsculpted. Percussive machines deafen foliage’s touch against foliage below. Screech upon screech of the slice of a saw severs ring upon ring of arboreal years. It drowns out for always the cello bow twilight oblique over leaves. After they’ve gone, all it was, distant traffic…

car park
for supermarket shoppers
the prices we paid

Diana Webb

The man sat smugly on the bus, holding a framed picture on his knees. He decided to hang it in the hall so that visitors would admire his good taste. He stood on a chair. His young daughter handed him a crooked nail.
–   What the hell am I supposed to do with that?
His wife handed him a knife with a heavy steel handle.
–   What’s this? Christ, I’m living with two idiots!
He tapped the nail into the plaster, then hung the picture on the nail, biting the knife between his teeth.
–    And now for the coup de grass (sic).
He hit the nail hard and the whole lot came crashing down.
–    Jesus Christ, it’s destroyed!
He grabbed his overcoat from the hall stand and left the house. His wife and daughter allowed themselves a little titter. However, they knew there would be hell to pay when he came home from the pub, ugly drunk.

splinter of glass
in the lino –
drawing blood

Gerry McDonnell