Wednesday, April 2, 2025

The Source

The Ghosts She Felt Acutely

This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots as a literary magazine in the 1920s, when our undergraduate contributors (including Evelyn Waugh, Graham...

Letter from the Orient

This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots...

A Short Sharp Shock to the Skull

This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots...

Rhonda May

This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots...

Lord Reginald Moreton of Oxfordshire

Poet's Note: "One of my favourite things to do whenever I visit new areas with my friends is to come up with ridiculous "histories"...

Dresse me my harpe

The speaker in Anna Cowan’s poem herself undertakes a myth-making activity in playing her harp. “It is time”, she declares, as she unshackles the...

The Demolished School

"Spending years of loneliness sitting on that toilet seat, a haven from slow lunch times with no friends, I knew the peeling paint as if it were my own palm, cream cracking, exposing the avocado green of the seventies."

As the smoke burns down to my fingers

To blink a bloodshot world away And drink in rough, and burn, and heat Until she comes to kiss the dark.

Sticky

Something crawls up my throat, more bitter than honey.

“Everywhere else, death is an end. Death comes, and they draw the curtains –”

Death comes, and they draw the curtains – Not in Spain. In Spain they open them.

Eve

Go, then - O girl, O derivative of...

Eve’s Laugh

Humour me with golden words...

Stalked by a bear at high table

perhaps next time i will kill the bear

Lost City

The undulating sands stretch out,  a vast expanse, sweltering under the gaze of the sun as it burns its way across the sky, dunes flowing like currents,  tides on...

Half Brit No Brit

'I hear you loudly in your echo chamber: ‘We’re in the most tolerant land of them all’ But the least racist is still racist.'

49 Years of Matrimony

Agnes need not have walked in on them fucking to know what was going on.

Ghosts in the Attic

'Unpack-repack. That recurring dream that you only have in your Home Bed...'

In Truth

'Everything I told you Came out untrue'

Time

'The clocks cry her name from Outside the door; Their hands are stiff and still.'

Changes by the River

'It doesn’t matter how stagnant we feel, The seasons keep on flowing'

Be

"Travelling into The sunset, a new cowboy ready to ride"

The Felling of Yggdrasil

"Worlds branch off like capillaries From an oaken aorta"

Ten Days Troilus Waits for Cressida

"Above me, the Milky wheel turns round and round"

Number 19

'Walking along the Edgware Road It's ten o'clock at night I glance down at my phone amongst it all And it's your name that glows in the light'

Follow us