The air has changed. It shrinks from us when we emerge

– the sun a shrivelled leaf, the air thinning.

Even the ants limp and

the cats are eating their own paws.

Buildings lean on one another like exhausted beggars;

salvage – an obscene dream.

This morning I wondered,

Is it time for me to hate myself?

Then I found a teenage boy,

sobbing

where there used to be a doorway.

I put my remaining arm around him.

Angela Graham was a runner-up in the 2025 Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. Culture & Democracy Press will publish her third poetry collection, Exposure, 75 poems on war, media and democracy in February 2026, having published her second, Star in 2024. Her 2022 poetry collection, Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere and 2020 short stories, A City Burning (Edge Hill Prize longlisted), are from Seren Books. Angela is from Northern Ireland. She won the Poetry Prize in the inaugural Linen Hall Ulster-Scots Writing Competition, 2021. She has had an award-winning career as a film maker and screenwriter in Wales. In 2022 she received an Honorary Life Fellowship from the Institute of Welsh Affairs for her work on media and democracy.