Fi Phillips

Compose is a new, biannual, online, writing publication that features work by writers of fiction, poetry and non fiction. Their issues comes out in spring and in autumn. They accept fiction, poetry, creative non fiction, articles on writing, excerpts from published works, photography and artwork. There is an accompanying blog  which regularly features Q&As from contributors. The managing editor is Canadian writer, Suzannah Windsor of Write It Sideways. You can view their first edition here .

When the days, and the nights, slip by in the pass of a hand, and the details of your life blur into a shade of mud, search for these things - the touch of the grass, the breath of the sky, and the reach of the trees. Touch. Breathe. Reach.

The cool, sharp tang of the sea carries on the evening breeze as the husky sigh of the wind rises to drown the murmur of shallow waves. Final echoes of the sun lay weary on the water, auburn dimming to grey. Like dust before a broom, the clouds disappear, leaving only the solitary moon to watch over the night.

I wrote this in July 2000. Untouched, yet felt, a guilty glance offered with the knowledge that once accepted, once succombed, there is no going back. Untouched, once more, we talk around the heat that hangs between us, levels of meaning silently entwining, warm in our minds' caress. Untouched, we part, and sigh that friendship held our hearts in virtue. Regret is sweet, and yet I wonder.

Another poem I wrote in 1991. Laughing with shared secrets, we sprang across the moors - boots heavy with peaty-earth, faces radiant with the winter air and each other. The heather was our sampler, where new joys, unwrapped in the shivering air, were offered, tasted and savoured. Too impatient, our eyes too naked, we could not see what would become of our wilderness shared. The eager cold, goose-pimpling us, would numb our emotions, and the the moors would be scorched grey.

Written by me and included in an anthology called 'The Write Moments' in 1990/91. She left me at the school gates. Alone, with a multitude of lost faces I watched, we watched, as she, they, waved, and the gates closed like a final sentence. I, we all, turned to the tarmac wasteland, precisely traced  with circuits of white paint. Our new parent, hovering, twittering, bird-like behind immense round spectacles, gathered us up in her nestling embrace, trapping our backward glance. We became a form, as the minutes tumbled by, of black and blonde, and brown and blue. Wellies, coats, bags, hooks marked with duck-shaped stickers, and words, our names gloriously written in rainbow crayons. She was forgotten, our home maker. She did not enter our minds, was pushed out by new textures, new tastes. She was not now, but later, when we charged into the afternoon. She was waiting where we had left her, or she had left us, by the school gates.