‘From the Pen of the Lovely Large Wolf’, a short story I wrote in the form of a letter to the editor of The Grimm Times, has been published in the April issue of Touchdown (The School Magazine). The illustrations by Greg Holfeld (gregholfeld.com) are delightfully detailed and fittingly funny.
Plastic rustles in my grip.
I smell salt breezes:
One million shells to collect.
I’m ready for conches, scallops,
Fingernails and cones,
Abalone rainbows and
Shells in delicate pink.
The first into my bag:
Fifteen butts of cigarettes,
Littered on the grass
Where my baby sister played
And picked them up.
The next:
A bottle, ready for breaking
Shattering through sand
That soft skin will tread
Ready to be rounded
(eventually)
Into prettier pieces.
And then:
A release of balloons
Flat and floppy
Coloured like jelly,
A terminal
Turtle’s banquet.
I don’t leave the beach
With shells
But I leave it with sand
Clean as conscience.
My sister dances and twirls
like a burnt leaf in the wind,
crackling with laughter.
She snatches and catches
at strange black objects
stark against mandarin skies.
A sieve of ash
like icing sugar topping a cake
sprinkles our shoulders
and I can’t help but think:
it’s a forest falling upon us
and everything in it turned to dust.
As Mum packs boxes in the car
(a Tetris game with photos, laptops, pyjamas, toys)
I unpack new boxes of fear:
things that never frightened me before,
like a whisking west wind
and a warm summer’s day.
As I pick pieces of fern
from frizzled hair
my sister starts spluttering.
I run to pat her back.
‘It’s like catching snowflakes,’ she says.
‘But you shouldn’t use your tongue.’
I was lucky enough to have one of my favourite stories published in Spaceports & Spidersilk this month. It’s a fantastic magazine packed with poetry and stories for kids who enjoy speculative fiction – fantasy, sci-fi, & scary stuff. You can pick up the July issue of Spaceports & Spidersilk for just USD $1.
“Deflated” is about a girl’s birthday party gone terribly wrong. I hope you enjoy it!
I was lucky enough to have one of my poems, ‘Spring Dreams,’ published in Touchdown (The School Magazine) this month. The illustration by artist Bronwyn Bancroft made my heart leap!
A poem I wrote, ‘My Grandmother’s Hands’, was published this week in Touchdown, an imprint of The School Magazine. It was my first children’s poem published in print, so it’s a landmark occasion for me. Many thanks to Matt Ottley for the gorgeous illustration.
Jessica Nelson-Tyers 
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