Meg Pokrass, "Old Girls and Palm Trees"

 

Meg Pokrass is the author of The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. She is a two-time winner of San Francisco’s Blue Light Book Award. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International. It has also been included in The Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2025; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary magazines including Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Rattle, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, New England Review, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, and Passages North. Meg is the founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review, festival curator and co-founder of Flash Fiction Festival UK, and founding / managing editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series. She lives in Inverness, Scotland, where she serves as chief judge for the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award.

About Old Girls and Palm Trees, by Meg Pokrass, illustrated by Cooper Renner
Old Girls and Palm Trees is an illustrated collection about iconoclasts, perpetual dreamers, tightrope walkers, living room magicians, cat lovers, and female friendship. The "old girls" in these linked hybrid pieces are women of a certain age who, in an alternate reality, refuse to accept the stereotypes of aging. The collection is conjured from dreamscapes of what just may be true. The poems, prose poems and micros in this collection invite us into an alternate reality where joy and love for same sex friends become a magical force to be reckoned with.  

You can read more about Old Girls and Palm Trees on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read five sample pieces from the collection. 

From Old Girls and Palm Trees

Rosy 

 

Late August we adopt a cat. The house brightens up. We name her after the pinkish-red clouds hanging around like half-eaten cotton candy. Rosy is a kisser, jumping on my desk, sniffing my lips. Twirling around in the living room chasing her tail. 

"Did you know that a scattering of wavelengths and blue light in the sky could be so lovely?" she says as the sky turns even more rosy than the night before.

Plunking Away on the Sofa 

 

It trickles down from my scalp as if it doesn’t know where to go or how to stop going there. "Stop moping about your mop," the old girl says. She smiles at me as if I’m perfectly imperfect and sits with the rosy cat while I plunk away on my ukulele, singing "When the Saints Come Marching In" to an audience of whiskers. 

"All we need now is a New Orleans funeral," she laughs, her arms around the cat—the three of us floating away to the islands.

Grand Entrances

 

At the Japanese lantern festival, the old girl and I hip-bump in, psyched about whatever people think of us, two zaps of purple in the crazy shuffle, licking wasabi from our lips, ignoring our hair, unpedicured, unmanicured, candid with hard-earned frumpiness. "You are my badge of honor," she says, holding my fingers. "You are my lantern in the wind."

Collector of Days

 

Late August, the dampness eased. We watched a squirrel collect nuts and take them back to her nest. I told the old girl, It’s almost September, you’re still here. She smiled. Where else? At the pond in the woods, we cast our fingers into the water, felt the cold sting. At the end of each dripping day we swung on the porch, kissing the rims of our wine glasses.  

 

Barbara Cooke, "Evelyn Waugh's Oxford"

 

Dr Barbara Cooke is a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She worked in publishing before completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is Co-executive Editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh and the author of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford.

About Evelyn Waugh's Oxford, by Barbara Cooke, with illustrations by Amy Dodd

Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford is a site-specific, creative-critical biography focusing on Waugh’s emotional and creative connection to the city. It begins by looking at Waugh’s Oxford through the lenses of invention, memory and imagination before exploring locations in the city that are particularly significant to his life and work. Waugh was a visual thinker, and the book includes reproductions of archival objects alongside specially commissioned images by Amy Dodd to create a dialogue between words and pictures, the imagined and the real.

You can read more about Evelyn Waugh's Oxford on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the book's location vignettes. 

From Evelyn Waugh's Oxford

Hall Brothers

When Waugh was at Oxford, all dapper undergraduates bought their suits from Hall Bros. The tailors were a city institution, and in the 1920s traded from a mock-Tudor building, replete with Elizabeth I’s coat of arms, at 94 Magpie Lane. 

…

In the 1920s they became the city’s foremost purveyor of ‘Oxford bags,’ very wide trousers first popularized by Waugh’s friend Harold Acton. Oxford bags really took off after Waugh had left, but they belonged firmly to a period when he still thought, talked and dressed like an undergraduate and became one of those – as he put it – ‘who cannot at once sever the cord uniting them to the university and haunt it for years to come.’ Like his student friends, Waugh teamed his bags with a high- or ‘turtle’-neck jumper which, he observed in November 1924, was ‘rather becoming and most convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties. It also hides the boils with which most of the young men seem to have encrusted their necks.’  

…

Waugh’s appreciation of the turtleneck jumper was typical of his pragmatic approach to fashion at the time .… As his financial situation eased, however, Waugh raised his sartorial ambitions. His brother Alec introduced him to Anderson Sheppard of London’s Savile Row,  whose suits made him feel, for the first time, not ‘the worst dressed person in every room.’  Being well turned out satisfied more than just Waugh’s vanity. For a man of his relatively humble origins, the cut of a seam could be the difference between social acceptance and rejection.

Illustration by Amy Dodd