Talking to other women, we all seem to cycle through this: switch it on, swipe, start a bunch of awkward conversations, go on a bunch of terrible dates, get frustrated and tired, delete the bloody thing, before downloading it again a few weeks, maybe a few months, later. In a moment of weakness, we say, but it’s not that, or not exactly.

Lighting, perhaps, the cigarette of the woman you love for the first time – still carrying matches,

I tend to judge the wildness of a night by how often you say bitches. There always used to be a car, at least, on fire. There’s that obsession

and they apologise in all their emails and they remember where they put their keys and they buy vegetables and milk

In the dream, there is repetition In the dream, I cannot make them understand
 In the dream, my fingertips itch, and they redden –


I am ankle-deep in leaves and though the days burn bright the fast-falling evening has a bite now:

I received the news digitally, in a text from an old housemate, Kat. Just to let you know, the message said. I was curled up on my couch, twined up with the new lover, whom I was introducing to a trashy sci-fi series I’d watched in the months after my first stint in a hospital day program, when I still felt too fragile for the social world, too tentative in my new routines, my new thought patterns, my new skin, to expose them too frequently to the wider world.

Later that night, I cut the plastic boning from the bodice of my dress:

He had good ideas in the shower, he was sitting upright heroically typing away on his computer – he improvised the filthiest, bawdiest limericks you can possibly imagine.

Rotate the potato. A labrador is happiest collecting kindling. While the football’s on in the other room we salt the pigskin: O, giver of gout. Brie suctions the wooden platter. Wisteria bruises on the patio.

Since the curtains came down on HEAT 24 – the final issue of the journal in print form – we’ve had a steady stream of correspondence from readers and writers alike (often in verse form) letting us know, as one long-term subscriber put it, that ‘the trip to the mailbox won’t be nearly as exciting’ anymore.

Little remains at track. Creepers, winding where the graded bed has grown so dank and soft