noun

the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period

the weather conditions
the whale congregations
the wisdom constructions
the wish consultants
the whiskied conscience
the worry controls
the worship controllers
the weather conditions
them all
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David Hermann is completing his Masters in Comparative Literature at
UCL. He writes a lot. Read him at hermannist.com

I look at the horizon for a trillion, trillion years.

It will happen, perhaps, and I will be a witness. The earth will miraculously cure itself. Water will turn into ice. Mesmerised, I will watch the white sculptures, remember the Arctic and its magnificence, and shiver on the shore. The sun will play tricks on my mind, engraving on the pure white ice the shadow of a long stalk. A single red tulip.

Congratulations, this flower is for you: the only human still alive, the only one who still believes in miracles.

Nora Nadjarian is a poet and short story writer from Cyprus. She has published three collections of poetry and a collection of short stories,
Ledra Street. Her fiction has recently appeared in elimae, fourpaperletters,
Staccato Fiction, Metazen, PicFic, Up the Staircase, Curly Red Stories,
LITnIMAGE and elsewhere. Blog: www.bettyboopinspired.blogspot.com.

Its chief contribution to the UK
must be as a unit of measurement,
as night after night
a news desk declares
‘An area of Rainforest,
the size of Wales disappears every year’.
0r, ‘The amount of water
London loses through its creaking Victorian pipes
would fill a swimming pool
the size of Wales’.
Every part of the world has a similar unit of measurement:
in the United States it’s an area the size of New Jersey;
on mainland Europe the reference more often than not
is Slovenia – which appropriately happens to be
98.4 percent the size of Wales.
But just how accurate is Wales
as a unit of measurement?
Just how constant is that land-mass?
It’s worth remembering that at low tide
Wales measures 20,761 SQ KM.
Whereas at high tide, it’s only 20,449 SQ KM
and to really put it into context,
each year coastal erosion erodes an area of Wales
the size of Central Swansea.
For those of you in Europe trying to visualise this,
that’s the equivalent of an area the size of down-town Ljubljana.

In 2008 Paul was poet for the London borough of Brent and he performed at the new Wembley Stadium. He has two poems in the new Penguin A-Z of children’s poetry. ‘The Value of Wales’ is taken from his new collection Catching the Cascade. (www.paul-lyalls.com)

ah, Merryman,

a fighter on the docks,

killed a man while they were unloading

bananas.

I mean the man he killed

clubbed him first

from behind

with an anchor chain

(something about a woman)

and we all circled around

while

Merryman

did him in

under a hard-on sun,

finally strangling him to death

throwing him into the

ocean.

Merryman leaped to the dock

and walked

away, nobody tried to stop

him.

then we went back to work and

unloaded the rest of the bananas.

nothing was ever said about the murder

between any of us

and I never saw anthing about it

in the papers.

although I saw some of the bananas

later in the

markets:

2 lbs. for a quarter

they seemed a

bargain.