Not Writing

Yasmin Inkersole
Writing, MA

On summer nights I go to the shed, its skylight aimed
At night sky as clear and intricate as the wing of a wasp.
Tonight, I choose to unwrite the stars. My pen rises
like the intake of a breath, and I lose it to

go where it may. Mind reaches down to hand, its distant
neighbour. Together they take space, plain and papery,
and fill it with song. Like moss and sticks, words build a nest
in some imaginary tree where there is no midnight, and under

the sky the shed does not exist. Where am I? Fingers
always move faster when I don’t know. Building the eaves
of an unreal house, creating coastlines and placing people
where normally there is no-one. I could not still it

if I tried, this hand of mine. With pen strokes it daubs
on a blue-ruled canvas, playing at architecture,
psychology, anatomy, biology, pinching the punchline
from a joke I heard, borrowing the muddy boots and grey

sky from my walk last week to make some new, unpredictable shape.
Where am I going? I look along the pathway of composite nouns
But the horizon is receding. The end of this line seems
not to be the beginning of the next. Here lie my fingertips, unable

to reclaim the land slipping from under them. All I want
is to walk back through the doorway, to enter the page
as easily as I stepped from the grass to the shed. It’s nearly
dawn. The skylight and I keep our own time.

We disagree about how soon I must head back to the house.

The History in These Walls

Nina Globerson
English Literature and Creative Writing

I have a calling
and it’s here in these walls.

It’s jumping from room to room
searching, creating

and thriving in the inspiration
that engraves itself in these halls.

From generation to generation
by each person that strives in their motivation

and who leave behind their marvellous creations.
This is our rich history:

one that is rooted in those late night,
first time, epiphanies.