MIR Editor

  • INTERNAL COMBUSTION IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE (AND OTHER POEMS), by John Greening

    Internal Combustion in Buckinghamshire The Cowper and Newton Museum is closed so I walk out (passing the Soul Garage) towards a country park where the flooded Ouse glares back and a tape tells me I’m forbidden. In the churchyard there is no reply from the slave-trader who is frowned on by a grim stone mask.…

  • APPRENTICESHIP, by Penny Walker

    Before earth, sea and sky, and before this community, I commit to protect the deep legacy from human disturbance, and to protect the world from the legacy, through the ten thousand years of its danger. I will preserve the records, knowledge and memory of this repository and what is buried here. This is my turn…

  • SIX OF THE BEST, by Bruno Noble

    What does one look for in a novel?  For me, it’s ideas and fine writing.  I gave a friend a book by John Updike once, and he said he hated being pulled out of the story to think, Oh what, a beautiful sentence this is!  But not me.  I like to wrap fine sentences around…

  • BY THE LIGHTS OF PICCADILLY, by Nadia Martin

    I watched images of a pouting statuesque beauty burst in two dimensions, frolicking inside the framed void, peering nonchalantly into the private room. Between flashes of the red swirling backdrop, I cast my eye over the nightstand, harbouring detritus of a life I knew too well: gin bottles, a candy storefront line-up of pills, Pepto-Bismol…

  • SIX OF THE BEST, by JB Smith

    To read Carlo Rovelli is to have your hand taken by a kindly Italian man with a soft voice and enigmatic smile, then led gently down the rabbit hole into a quantum wonderland where the only thing you can be certain of is that certainty doesn’t exist.

  • HALO, by Ben Tufnell

    Just days after placing the book on the shelf I run a finger across the cover and leave a faint wake of darkness.

  • PRO-NUN-SEE-AY-SHUN, by Bediye Topal

    You tell me to shape sounds with my mouth. I tell you, I have left my tongue behind.

  • WILL SHE EVER PUNCTU8 HIM?, by Bediye Topal

    he is an endless incoherent sentence in her body if she questions him words will blur letters will change their position explain to me will be

  • THE SHORT STORY THAT WON LOUIE CONWAY SECOND IN THE BRICK LANE BOOKSHOP PRIZE, by Summer Kendrick

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    “The baby understands with a kind of instinctive visceral despair that a process of change is underway which, once complete, cannot be reversed.”

  • PARAKEETS OF LONDON, by JB Smith

    If you take a walk through one of London’s many parks, the chances are you will see a parakeet. Indeed, the likelihood is you will see dozens of the things, caterwauling amongst the trees in rowdy flocks of yellow and green.