Issue 31

Popshot Magazine

The illustrated magazine of new writing

Popshot Magazine2 min read
Editorial
SPRING 2021 Intimacy is more important than ever at a time when many of us are sequestered away in our homes. The simplest acts of intimacy, from a hug to a pat on the knee or a held hand are currently off-limits except to our immediate households. B
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Popshot Magazine
Cover illustration by: Chuchu Briquet chuchubriquet.com Editor: Matilda Battersby Art Editor: Lauren Debono-Elliot Group Editor: Steve Pill Publisher: Simon Temlett Published by: Chelsea Magazine Company Ltd chelseamagazines.com Distributed by: Seymo
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Price Right
She fell deeply, madly, inexplicably in love with the head of lettuce. It sat there so unobtrusively under the grocery store lights, bathed in a fine mist of shining water. She wasn’t even looking for love, but it found her, right there in the produc
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Humans
sat in the quiet pub waiting for him to get the drinksat another table when their girlfriends have gone to the toiletI see him drape his arm over his mate’sshoulder and then stroke his friend’s facenot sexual not romanticaffectionate and thinking the
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Bathing
Sat straddled by my mother in the porcelain tub, she bathes me in grey water freshly rinsed off her own skin. The bathroom is silent, save for the monotony of her palms cradling the suds that trickle over my hair, down my bared spine, landing back in
Popshot Magazine2 min read
Sunday Morning Clothes
Gabe Mayfield was an artist who painted nothing but clothing. He painted polka-dot pyjamas dangling on washing lines, pressed suits laid out on beds, lacy underwear caught on lampshades and coloured t-shirts fusing together in washing machines. His l
Popshot Magazine9 min read
Virginia Holloway Doesn’t Pay For Cheese
Virginia clutched the tub of fresh mozzarella close to her chest. The slogan across the lid read, “always fresh and creamy.” Looking around, she spotted a young employee stacking boxes at a nearby table. “Excuse me,” she called out. The employee kept
Popshot Magazine1 min read
For My Mother, Who I Can No Longer Hold
A clutched thumb and I fall to pieces.Just about hold it together on the surface.Keeping up appearances, like it's all okay,just a blip on the radar, a short passing phase,that we'll look back on and laugh at.Those misshapen days, when we satat both
Popshot Magazine2 min read
Haircut
I looked at myself. My black hair fell down to my waist in a long smooth sheet of damp silk. I had tended it carefully for so many years, with countless oils and masks and unguents; not that it had done me much good. He’d left anyway, for a woman wit
Popshot Magazine2 min read
Do You Know The Mattress Man?
I crawled into Joe’s van when I turned sixteen. The Owl Creek Park oak trees were still dressed in jaundiced leaves. There were no back seats, only a stack of mattresses from dorm dumpsters and apartment evictions. It was the edge of an Indian summer
Popshot Magazine13 min read
Marla
And of course, there is the year where she thinks: I cannot do this. And she remembers the awful boyfriend she had when she was twenty-one who she both loved and hated with equal measure; the awful boyfriend who started turning up with skin like spli
Popshot Magazine1 min read
I Always Fall In Love Inside Hospitals
It was the intensive care nurse who believed I was in pain.The morphine when it arrived in my veins.The fresh sheets every twelve hours, the drain when it fell out—and doctors agreed it didn’t need to be put back in.The first time I sat without stitc
Popshot Magazine7 min read
Jenkins
Jenkins fucked me on a beach at Dungeness and my knees carried the indents of pebbles for days after. I’d seen him the night before in a drag pub in Brighton. In a tight fitting blue T-shirt and jean jacket he was just my type. I was eighteen, studyi
Popshot Magazine1 min read
The Here, Not Here
She described it as the greatest story of our time,this idea of being present but not, occupying space but the mind scrolling through anotherscreen, and I immediately began to cry, not cry. Or maybe it was the fact that leaving is neverleaving for me
Popshot Magazine2 min read
The Woman In The Bay Window
He hadn't noticed her before, until the days shortened and each window in the block of flats opposite was illuminated giving a clear view of the lives being lived within. When he first saw her, she was lounging on the window sill drinking red wine an
Popshot Magazine9 min read
How The Life Goes On
Astro’s limp had got progressively worse over the last few days. Dan watched whenever his dog left the sofa, which was happening less and less frequently. As a puppy, Astro would jump from the sofa into Dan’s arms and then out again into Jen’s arms.
Popshot Magazine5 min read
Balaclava Babe
January 1982 I gaze through one-way glass. Empty my mind, free floating and detached, waiting for a spark, a jolt, a drum roll—anything at all that will enable me to say effortlessly, unequivocally, “It’s you. You’re the one.” I gaze, unblinking, unt
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Temps Mort
Long afterI taste myselfon your mouth,long after that. After blue,after blue veil breathsdissolveand still clinging skin cellsmoth. After damp,after damp film driesand the stuttering afterglow dimsthen dies. After you’ve gonelong, long after that the
Popshot Magazine4 min read
Reunion
You think you’ve seen it before, the shadow in his eyes. The darkness. The way he looks elsewhere. Like now, when he changes the subject. When his mouth smiles but his eyes are gone. You watch as he opens a cupboard, takes out the packet of cereal, c
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Forever To You
I can’t sleepEvery time I remember your wordsThey snap and recoilAnd hurt me awakeNext time when someonePromises me foreverI’ll just smileLook them in the eyes and askHow long is forever to you. ■
Popshot Magazine10 min read
Rising Sign
I am watching my womb on television. On my back, knees high and wide. The doctor has inserted a wand that carries sound inside me. Sound I cannot hear is echoing through my interior, visualising the black cave of my body, detecting abnormalities. I t
Popshot Magazine2 min read
Mosaic Maker
A boy broke my heart once. It’s fine, no really it is. I’m a mosaic maker, I make masterpieces out of fragments and shards. Sure, it took me a while to collect them all at first. My hands were too cold, too numb, trembling too frantically to grasp th
Popshot Magazine1 min read
The Other Half
Your breathing deepens into dreams, while hailstones rattle against the window denying me sleep. Memories wander through long years of ups and downsin our union, seeking validation. Youth’s passionMellowed, desire evolves with unexpected richness. Sp
Popshot Magazine1 min read
What Now?
I sit down in front of her. This won’t be easy. I try to start speaking, but the words die as they hit the oxygen, like they can only survive inside of me. There was a time when I thought she could do everything for me, be anyone for me, say everythi
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Aubade
If I weren’t a morning person, I thinkI’d like you better. If I could sleep—notlie waiting for your heavy eyes to blinkawake, for you to pull your covers taut.Golden light drips off blinds, shifting the sun-drawn topography lines across your sheets.Y
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Silent Game
You didn’t have to say a thing for me to knowa game had just begun.Something in the way you took my handsaid ‘Don’t let go’and so we ended up one-handed in the bathroombrushing teeth, politelyhelping one another with the toothpaste, taking turnsuntil
Popshot Magazine2 min read
My Flatmate, Her New Boyfriend And My Emotional Availability
I woke up to the sound of them having sex in the shower. I recognised the rhythm of Hannah’s breathy moans and Ian’s deep grunts through the thin walls, reaching their crescendo as I gained consciousness. Having abandoned my attempt to get back to sl
Popshot Magazine3 min read
Endnotes
8 – Trista Wilson is a bookseller in Wichita, USA, and author of middle-grade novel, Sometimes Brave. She has been published in Hunger Mountain, Yarn and Everyday Fiction. 10 – James McDermott is a queer writer based in East Anglia. His published pla
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Illustrators
Allie Sullberg alliesullberg.com Andrea Safarikova andreasafarikova.com Beatrice Simpkiss beatricesimpkiss.com Cara Rooney cararooney.com Chu Chu Briquet chuchubriquet.com Ciaran Murphy ciaranmurphyillustration.com Clare Davis claredavislondon.co.uk
Popshot Magazine1 min read
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