Of the poems, I particularly liked �My Krishna� by Karen Noakes. Her poem �Pablo� was also beautiful, though it was cut off at the bottom of the page - leaving me to wonder what the rest of the work was like. �Your Sounds, or a Celebration of My Husband� by Louie Crew and Ryan Bird�s two poems, �The Worst Seesaw� and �The Window� are also well worth reading. I especially liked �The Window�: �with angry whips around corners / and moans through hollow / spaces - / it�s far too typical / of us to label the wind / a ghost.�

A piece of non-fiction, �Cosmological Cook Book� by Peter Rolls, consists of two recipes for the making of a habitable planet - one the Biblical method, the other the evolutionary method. They both come with their shortcomings - one requires faith, the other is subject to scientific dispute. The recipes are a nicely succinct and humorous way of summing up conflicting ideas about how the Earth was born. Another non-fiction piece, �Ship Log� by Eleanor Taylor details an eerie and haunting voyage in the Baltic Sea, while Unity Flow provides two amusing cartoons.

Jonathan Guilford�s �Rainmaker� features an American family hit by a drought, who are visited by the Rainmaker, a man who clearly has an agenda of his own. There are mysterious undercurrents in this excerpt, hints of coming betrayal. �Rainmaker� is one of those orphan leaves that leave the reader wondering about what comes next.

Krystal Hansen offers the elegantly poetic �To Hide From Daylight�, where the wind becomes a character in the story, at first almost a sexual aggressor attacking the woman by pulling at her clothes, before becoming more gentle, like a lover.

�Five Leaves Fallow� by Frances Ball focuses on a childless woman who is visiting a church, and who climbs to the roof to look at the countryside where there are five fallow fields. They belong to her, they are emblematic of her life, since her sister has five children. �Five Leaves Fallow� has some lovely descriptive writing, and a sensitively observed reflective tone. Brendan Connell�s �Dublin: A Metrophilia� follows erotic pyromaniacs, but rather put me off with the burning of birds and small animals in the first paragraph. The pyromaniacs seem to hark back in some way to ancient pagans, and the excerpt is certainly well written.

One of the strongest of the fiction pieces is �Lakshmi� by Ramesh Avadhani. A funeral party gathers for the burning of Lakshmi�s body. Her husband lights the fire, and her skull is cracked open at the end to set her soul free. The narrator is an observer, part of the funeral party. He wants to know how she died, why she was admitted to hospital, but the answer to that lies beyond this page.

Grant Perry returns with another excerpt from �Reflections of a Swordsman� where the hundred year old character, a swordsman of the sexual variety, soaks in the bath, thinking about his life, the places he�s been, the jobs he�s done, the women he�s known.

�Aqua City� by Leigh G Banks is set around a tourist resort that taps into geothermic energy, with hot springs. But the venture also includes cryogenics, though this seems to involve cryogenic treatment for the living rather than for the dead. That�s how I read it, but of course, the mystery of the cryogenics is left to the reader�s imagination since we have only this single leaf of the story to go on.

�Skin� By Judith Beck also leaves the reader wondering. A woman falls to the floor in grief and despair at the beginning. She�s just received a phonecall, but it�s a few minutes before the narrator can ascertain what has happened. Another character, Hector, has been found with others, locked in a van, without food or water, in the desert north of the Mexican border. We never find out who these people are exactly - smugglers bringing in contraband goods possibly. There are undercurrents running through �Skin� that hint at a larger narrative.

Added to all this there�s The Single Line Quarterly, stories or novels told in one line. This too takes up exactly one leaf in the magazine. The Orphan Leaf Review continues to offer imaginative and high quality writing. Each page is a different texture, weight, or colour, as if they did indeed come from different books. It�s a beautifully hand-produced publication.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she�s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara�s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.