To Úrsula Iguarán
A mouth gnawing at the cemented floor.
The tail a sky of shadow. Between niches
mousing, a scratch of claws. Two eyes
planetting the room
of my conscience. Guilt can take on
many forms. As a hole
in the sprawl of air. A hole
that housed
a spear. A throat it makes around it.
A head it wedges in, the mesh
of bone and body it zeroes in on. The hand
that weaves into esparto grass.
Walking as a man does, sad
and searching
until you haunt courtyards
for the open faucet, or floorboards
for the ticking beetle,
or the telling heart in spite.
Ever since grandma told me, a civet cat
knocking over boxes of what I have
squirreled in my head.
Rahana K Ismail is a poet and doctor from Kozhikode, Kerala. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Penn Review, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, nether Quarterly, Contemporary Haibun Online, Usawa Literary Review, POSIT, Io Literary Journal (Refractions), The Alchemy Spoon, Paradoxlit, Farmer-ish, Poetic Sun, Chakkar, Alipore Post, Aainanagar, Hakara, Verse of Silence, EKL Review, Pine Cone Review and elsewhere.
Born and raised in Manchester, UK, Rhianne has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at The University of Manchester. She has loved words (and arranging them) since she could put fluffy pen to paper (that’s a lot of fluff, and a lot of paper!). She explores human relationships in all of their wonderful complexity in her work and writes a lot about mental health, a subject close to her heart. You can find more of her poetry and general musings over at 
Belinda has had a varied career: psychiatric nurse, counsellor, lecturer and creative arts practitioner. Her poems have appeared in magazines, for example, Brittle Star, Dream Catcher, ARTEMISpoetry and Obsessed with Pipework. She has poems on-line and in anthologies. She won the Poetry in Motion Competition to turn her poem into a film and read at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. You can find her at 
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. His work has recently been published in New Plains Review, Stillwater Review and Big Muddy Review, and is upcoming in Louisiana Review, Columbia College Literary Review and Spoon River Poetry Review.
Foxglove Journal 