The following text is a poem by Priya Nair.

Migration

The swallows left on the same morning as the first frost, as if they had been watching the thermometer and booking passage.

5 I do not anthropomorphise. I know they leave because the insects go and the insects go because the cold comes and the cold comes because the earth is tilted as it is.

10 Still, I stood at the window a long time after the last of them.

There is a marsh seven thousand miles south where they will overwinter without knowing they have left. 15 They carry no concept of departure. They will not miss these fields.

I will not miss these fields either. I am also leaving at the end of the month. I have also made arrangements.

20 I wonder sometimes what it is to travel without loss, to arrive somewhere new and find it simply: the place where you are. To winter without knowing 25 that you are wintering.

The following text is an excerpt from The Unlit Candle, a play by Marla Venn. In a church vestry one evening, the elderly Deacon Hollis folds vestments while Fenn, a young man in his coat, tells him he no longer believes.

Title: The Unlit Candle

Setting: A narrow vestry. A single window, grey with evening.

Characters: DEACON HOLLIS (sixty, folds vestments with great care), FENN (twenty-three, stands by the door, his coat already on)

The following text is a poem by Ada Merrivale.

What the Drawer Kept

I was seven when the drawer said open me,
the third one down, that stuck and then gave way
to spools of grey thread, buttons like small coins,
a thimble worn to silver at the crown.
I took it. Not for need. For the cool weight
of it, the way it fit my finger like
a helmet made for one soft-headed thought.
All summer it lived inside my sock drawer,
under the folded dark, a stolen moon.
When she asked had I seen it, I said no,
and watched my own voice leave me, smooth and quick,
a fish that would not come back to my hand.
She is gone now. The thimble is not gone.
It sits here on my desk and holds the light
the way a small confession holds a room,
saying nothing, asking to be said.
I have kept it longer than I kept her face.
Some things you steal become the thing that keeps you.
I turn it over. Silver. Cool. Awake.
The drawer is closed. The lie is still ajar.

The following text is a poem by Sofia Reyes.

Two Cities

In the city of my childhood the sky came down close, a grey lid on everything, and my grandmother smelled of bread 5 and the particular cold of her hallway and I thought: this is the world. This was the world.

In the city where I live now the sky is a different colour every morning 10 and no one remembers the week before last and the bread has fifteen ingredients and a name. A brand. Everything here has been named until it means less than it meant.

15 I have learned to love the long light here, the way it makes strangers photogenic, the beautiful abundance of what is offered.

Still, at the back of my throat, the taste of that hallway. 20 Still, in some rooms, the smell of bread that does not have a name.

The following text is an excerpt from the memoir The Chimney Birds by Nuala Feenan. The adult narrator recalls a winter morning in childhood when a starling that had fallen down the chimney is trapped in the front room, and the family must decide how to free it.

The Chimney Birds

We were a house that birds fell into. It was the chimney that did it, a wide cold Victorian throat that swallowed the sky and now and then gave a piece of it back, and so my childhood is punctuated by mornings when we came down to find a starling loose in the front room, mad with the wrongness of walls.

I remember one in particular, the winter I was eight. It had come down in the night and beaten itself half senseless against the window, and by the time we found it the sill was dusted with the fine grey talc of its panic, and the bird itself sat in the corner of the curtain rail, tilted, one wing held wrong, watching us with an eye like a bead of black water.

My father wanted to open the window and let it find its own way. My mother wanted the cat shut in the kitchen and no fuss. I wanted, with the fierce and stupid love of a child, to hold it. To be the one it trusted. I had a picture of it sitting in my cupped hands, calmed, choosing me, and the picture was so bright in me that I climbed on a chair before anyone could stop me and reached up into the curtain.

What I learned, in the half second before it exploded past my face, was that a wild thing does not want your love and has no use for it. The bird went off like a wet firework. It was all around the room at once, a grey panic with a heartbeat, and it hit the glass, and hit it again, and something in me that had wanted to possess it broke open into something better, which was the simple animal wish for it to be all right.

My father opened the window. The cold came in like a held breath let go. And the bird found the gap almost before we saw it move, out over the frosted gardens, a dark stitch pulled quickly through the white morning and lost.

I have thought about that starling for forty years. I think it taught me the first true thing I ever knew about love, which is that the creatures we love most are precisely the ones we cannot keep, that wildness is not a fault in a thing to be corrected but the very part of it we have no right to, and that the kindest hands we own are the ones we learn, against everything in us, to open.