HURRAY FOR HAIRY SNAIL HUNTERS

by Jerome Betts

Search is on for the German hairy snail in London:

Conchologists and citizen scientists team up to seek

out endangered mollusc species along River Thames.

—The Guardian,November 24, 2025

  

Hush, hush, chortle who dares,

At people out looking for shells growing hairs!

They’re along by the Thames under pieces of  wood,

Only fingernail-sized, though they may have withstood

A break from old Europe worse than Boris’s Brexit

As Doggerland sank and sea rose to annex it.

So here’s to conchologists, clean-shaven or hirsute,

As they seek tiny molluscs encased in a fur suit!

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the verse quarterly Lighten Up Online.

BIRNAM WOULD

by Adele Evershed

There was anger and sadness among people who turned out over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend to protest at the destruction of a tree in Enfield thought to be up to 500 years old… The pedunculate oak, which was cut down on 3 April, was located on the edge of an Enfield council-owned park in north London and overlooked the Toby Carvery pub... Mitchells & Butlers, the owners of the Toby Carvery pub chain, said they cut down the tree after being told it was dead. —BBC, April 21, 2025

I was born in a time of unrest,
where tongues swelled against
religion and unfaithful wives,
riots in the street,
and resentments as large as cats
festering in unemptied bins.

I grew through it all—
pandemics and plagues,
great fires and floods,
watching people work themselves to death,
to be replaced as easily as spokes on a wheel,
bent on moving the carts forward,
but I was in no hurry,
so I was left alone.

The Thames iced over
while frost fairs and firing squads
amused the people,
and all the artists with numb fingers
captured the scenes—
though sometimes they painted over
dead children in the snow.
I never forgot they were there.

The wind moved through me,
leaving a coating of urban sprawl,
and I was the one left
bearing witness to
bombs, broken nights, boozy slashes
oozing rivers of blood,
the good and the very, very bad—
I survived it all,
until a man from a toby-jug pub,
came with a weapon of mass destruction
and cut me down.

Soon there will be no thing left
to tell the old stories,
and how will you know yourselves then?

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the valleys for the American East Coast. You can find some of her writing in Gyroscope, Free Flash Fiction, Trash Cat Lit, Janus Lit, and Poetry Wales. Adele has two poetry collections, Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and The Brink of Silence (Bottlecap Press). Her third collection In the Belly of the Wail is upcoming with Querencia Press. She has published two novellas in flash, Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and has a forthcoming novella, A History of Hand Thrown Walls, with Unsolicited Press.

QUEUED

by Annie Cowell

The queue for Queen Elizabeth II's lying-in-state is visible from space in this photo taken Sept. 16, 2022. (Image credit: Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies @Maxar via Space.com.)

We feel

it is a very

British thing,

the queue.

That we 

invented it,

monopolise it,

transformed it

into art. 

We queue,

best foot

forward, wearing

stiff upper lips,

displaying 

plumes of

peacock pride.

For centuries 

we have practised; 

in war time 

ration lines, 

supermarkets, 

airports, 

Wimbledon. 

It agitates 

our sense

of fairness;

we are ready

to be tested, 

to fight 

for our 

rightful

place. 

Now, 

we have

the mother

of all 

queues.

A record 

breaker,

meandering

for miles,

flowing 

like the

Thames through 

the heart 

of London.

A pulsing

tail of 

humanity,

from Britain 

and abroad

eager to 

embrace

a marathon

of waiting

and be a part 

of history.

No agitation

here, instead

a camaraderie

of shared

experience,

of sorrow.

At last,

there is

the end.

A pause,

in which

to bow 

our heads.

Pay respects.

Duty

bound, 

it seems,

to say

farewell. 

Annie Cowell  grew up in Northern England. She is a former teacher who lives by the sea in Cyprus with her husband and rescue dogs. She is widely published in Popshot Quarterly, The Milk House, Paddler Press, and more. Her debut chapbook Birth Mote(s) is now available.

SOME DAY, PERHAPS...

IT WILL HELP TO REMEMBER THESE TROUBLES AS WELL.*

by Bonnie Naradzay

*Aeneas to his men, after theirs is the only ship

  to survive a violent storm at sea near Carthage.

         

Friends, a study of The Black Death states the plague 

may have come from outer space. The Mars Rover 

landed in a dried up lake. Perseverance is transporting 

images home from the red planet. On earth, we learn 

that magnetic north and south may be flipping sides, 

an ominous event, according to weakening attractions 

and ancient iron shards stuck pointing the wrong way. 

In Galveston, medical workers asked for a refrigerated 

truck to store the dead bodies. Thousands of turtles 

stunned by the cold have gone to a convention center 

in the backs of station wagons. Ted Cruz got on the plane

in jeans but went the wrong way, or the optics were wrong.

Sweet Thames, and Virgil, flow gently while I end my song.

Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry workshops at a day shelter for homeless people and at a retirement center, both in Washington DC.  Recent poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), Kenyon Review Online, RHINO, Tar River Poetry, Tampa Review, Poet Lore, EPOCH, Northern Virginia Review, Anglican Theological Review, Seminary Ridge Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.

LEAK (OUT)

by Alejandro Escudé

Couldn’t he have moved to Ecuador? Surrounded by parrots and monkeys,
and colonial era churches? Instead, bearded, he was ushered

into a police van in London, and I pictured Sherlock Holmes standing off to one side,
a grin on his pointy face, pipe in hand, uttering something cheeky.

How else to process this 9/11 man? This walking man-virus
who somehow snatched the biggest governments on Earth
like a father might snatch his little son by the ear, dragging them to their perspective rooms.

White-haired wizard now, Assange protested his apprehension,
London traffic like a street scene in Thomas the Train;

because this time is…and was…a cave full of glittering fossils, mandibles of early hominids, skulls or skull fragments, roaring time signatures,
blue birds oozing from fissures in the once-dark ceilings.

Ecuadorians said Assange's residence was no longer tenable. A tree, alabaster white,
growing in his room, the roots digging deep, reaching for the planetary pole,
emailed enigmas, evil conspiracies,

a G-Man in Dealey Plaza, bullets screaming past, halting
mid-air, like satellites approaching the black hole of history,

and there, Assange, naked, albino, crucified on a hill outside the city’s firewalls.
I want to ask him what was the ultimate secret
he was searching for? I want to stroll over the glassy Thames
with him, like a heavenly correspondent
interviewing an implacable terrorist, the devil made flesh, a fiberoptic alien,

and just listen to the diatribe of his breathing,
and feast on what he sought, and probe as to what he’d embezzled
from the pressing otherness of our voiceless governments.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.