Monday 10 September 2018


No stone unturned.

by Oonah V Joslin


Turns out that paving stones
are not all made of stone.
Who knew?

There’s natural slate of course
and Indian sandstone
but the norm apparently
is man made composites
sort o’ concrete paving slabs
to curb maybe
my natural
female cravings.

And if I say 600 millimetre
yer man-o says 2 inches
and vice-versa
but men like inches better
they sound bigger.

And then when I get home
2 inch turns out to be
570 millimetres
which at a pinch will do but hey
who knew? So incrementally
the discrepancy
between us grew.

And big stones come
in packs
of different sizes
which cannot be split easily.
Perhaps the plastic acts as a kind of
strong nuclear force
that keeps them bound
so single-sized individual stones
can hardly be found it seems,
existing only
in the fantasy realm
of female dreams.


* * * * *

Oonah V Joslin is poetry editor at The Linnet’s Wings. She has won prizes for both poetry and micro-fiction. Her book Three Pounds of Cells ISBN: 13: 978-1535486491 is available online from Linnet’s Wings Press and you can see and hear Oonah read in this National Trust video. The first part of her novella A Genie in a Jam is serialised at Bewildering Stories, along with a large body of her work (see Bibliography). You can follow Oonah on Facebook or at Parallel Oonahverse https://oovj.wordpress.com/.



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