I left the car on the cliff top,
went looking for a toilet, found a bird.
There used to be a coal mine under here –
that’s what the guidebook said,
and the mark on the map.
It’s long dead, whatever it was,
probably dead when I was at home
looking it up in the bird book.
Fieldfare? Thrush? Which colour plate,
which description did it fit?
Anyway, there it was, trapped in a toilet block
in a car park empty of other visitors.
There were only two of us.
This assemblage of stone sand wind and air
progressed up and down the cubicles,
one two three four five five four three two one
its feet scrabbling on the overhead cisterns.
Too far above me to catch, it wouldn’t be wafted
towards the doorway with my map.
Already I was trying to name it as it struck
at the skylight that we could both see.
Death was always certain – inside a neglected egg,
by teeth or talon, by being shaken loose.
It didn’t need its name, only the sky which turned solid on it.
I flushed and walked out over the stone floor
into the wind, past the laminated pictures of the mine.
I got back into the car, drove to the heritage museum
where miners are trapped on a screen, to be bidden by a button
so someone knows they’re still there.
It’s history now, that bird. I thought about it
on the motorway all the way home.
Isabel is from and of London where she works in a museum. In a former life she was a youth worker then a tour guide. Her poems has been published in Orbis and she can be found discussing poetry, art, gardening urban history, and the natural world on her Instagram account @ijgreenslade.
Don is a biomedical researcher living in Pittsburgh, PA. His poetry has appeared online at TuckMagazine.com, Uppagus Magazine, Vox Populi Sphere, and others, in print in Hanging Loose (1972) and Neurology, and in several print anthologies including in both English and Farsi in Persian Sugar in English Tea, Volumes I and III.
Susan Richardson is living, writing and going blind in Los Angeles. In addition to poetry, she writes a blog called, 
Sarah Hulme is a Durham University graduate who enjoys writing poetry as a way to understand thoughts, feelings and the world we live in.
Trivarna Hariharan is an undergraduate student of English literature from India. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has authored The Necessity of Geography (Flutter Press), Home and Other Places (Nivasini Publishers), Letters I Never Sent (Writers Workshop, Kolkata). Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, Third Wednesday, Otoliths, Peacock Journal, One Sentence Poems, Birds Piled Loosely, TXTOBJX, Front Porch Review, Eunoia Review, and others. In October 2017, Calamus Journal nominated her poem for a Pushcart Prize. She has served as the editor in chief at Inklette, and is the poetry editor for Corner Club Press. Besides writing, she learns the electronic keyboard, and has completed her fourth grade in the instrument at Trinity College of Music, London.
Ion Corcos has been published in Grey Sparrow Journal, Clear Poetry, Communion, The High Window and other journals. 
Sanja Dragojlov is a final year Ph.D. student at Cardiff University in EU Politics. She is also the author of Amaranth (Demon City Chronicles), President of the Creative Writing Society at Cardiff University and the Creative Editor for Quench magazine. In her spare time, she also enjoys traveling, reading and learning a new language. She speaks five at the moment which include Serbian, Spanish, Italian, Croatian and French.
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