Queer Writers Circle | August 12th, 2026 | ECLIPSE



An impromptu anthology written during 
the total solar eclipse

eclipse | Aimee Cliff
AM2PM | F. Zeeshan Choudhury
Partial Eclipse of the Heart | Jane Marlow
Communing | Jessy Emery
Not My Moon | Lis Harrington
Untitled | Nour
The Community | Sophie Edwards
Instructions for An Eclipse | Zoë Goodhead





Edited by  F.  Zeeshan Choudhury

 


eclipse
Aimee Cliff


Mum texts me, 
“Don’t look directly at the sun,
Not even for a second!”
Apparently it’s a human instinct,
Looking –
They say the milky dark makes us drop our defences,
Right when our pupils are most vulnerable, 
According to a doctor on the radio,
We turn our spongy, dilated eyes
Up to the sky right as it pours with toxic bleach;
We risk it all for a glimpse. 

But I’ve been practicing,
No, I’ve mastered the art of 
Not looking –
Of being one body obscured by another,
A body I can’t see directly –
Bedsheets thrown over the mirror –
Fortressed inside my imagination
Is an idea of a person that burns to the touch;
When my defences are low, I look at my reflection
And catch their eye, 
Watching me from the wrong face.

Am2PM
F. Zeeshan Choudhury

Somewhere in space the moon moves around Earth which moves around Sun & their paths cross every 18 months or so which isn’t so special except it’s happening in Europe, but was exciting for the sweaty men asking for eclipse glasses in front of me, in line, while I bought a beverage at AM2PM, East London’s worst corner store, which always loses my packages and smells of stress.

Nobody is talking about how right now here (Earth) we are moving through the dust trail of the Comet Swift-Tuttle. Two men called Lewis and Horace respectively slapped their names on it in 1862. The dust trail is also called The Perseid meteor shower which sounds scarier and more refreshing.

If you wanted to watch them, dull rocks pockmarked by collisions, tonight at 2am they will look like shooting stars, light catching on debris. (Of course you’d need a telescope probably, and to be standing on a big dark hill away from any major road or city, which would be hard.)

But at least you could look with bare eyes and not be in line at AM2PM, sweat dripping off your six pack, begging for some glasses. 

Or you could try to look. The eclipsed sun would burn through the cornea, which is a clear outer dome that bends light into the pupil, which would contract just slow enough that it (the light) would burn your retina which has no pain receptors to warn it when the damage is happening. Lucky. 

Partial Eclipse of the Heart

Jane Marlow 


I hurried along the street, head down, eyes down, the horror of losing my sight by simply looking up at the sky, the sun – the most essential awesome presence that breathes life into our universe - was magnetically drawing my attention.

Don’t look up, don’t look up, don’t look up. Get inside. Somewhere. Anywhere. But how do you do that when you have no home?

Once upon I time I was falling in love. I had a home then. I walked with purpose. I didn’t scuttle around then.

I pushed on. I stuck my earbuds into my ears and Sophie Rayworth’s BBC voice funnelled into my head. Live at the big domey building at Greenwich that the British decreed to be the beginning of time.

Earphones – for an eclipse. My own paranoia, the lack of trust I had in myself, made me laugh. Momentarily. Then cry. Missing out on a once in a generation event was no laughing matter.

My eyes were fixed on the chewing gum encrusted pavement as the awesome orb was described by Rayworth’s trusted, jewel-in-the-crown, safe pair of non-paedophile hands were my proxy.

That’s where I should have been. Crowds were flocking to Didcot in a carpark. Didcot. Really? I wondered if that was the Civic Hall where her mother had had her retirement party.

More crowds on Hengistbury Head in Dorset prepared, forewarned, forearmed, forever and always in the right place and the right time with the right equipment. Without fear.

I stumbled past crushed cans, vape packets, sunglasses pulled on tightly, although I know they were an inadequate line of defence against the real and present, magical, danger in the sky.

My eyes flicked from left to right, trying to find a sanctuary.

Don’t look up, don’t look up, sunglasses are no good. Where’s the colander when you need it? In storage. With all the other things she didn’t want. We were together 28 years. We had three. One metal one from her grandma, a plastic one from Ikea that split and the one from the plastic shop on the Roman Road.

Don’t look up. Don’t turn around, bright eyes. Don’t look up. Don’t look up.

I could feel the light change like someone had pumped dry ice onto the film set of a street – it must have started. The temptation to take part and be present was strong but my fear of being blinded was stronger. Anxiety, a lack of bravery and belief that had wrapped around me the moment she walked out stealing yet another life experience in the from me.

Blindness or wonder?

Irreparable damage or fleeting joy?

The dark end of the binary, the big black blob in my soul eclipsing my life, my heart, my experience, my joy and ability to be the person I knew deep inside was somewhere in me.

I crossed the road and back and back again, even contemplated walking backwards trying to reassure myself that every now and then we all fall apart.

And then I saw the woman out of corner of my downcast eyes. Her smile lighting up the stoop she was sitting on. “It’s so cool isn’t it,” she said. “Would you like to borrow my glasses and have a look?”

Yes. Yes.  Yes, I bloody would.

Communing
Jessy Emery


Aren’t we all just
                                   creatures
leaning up towards the sun?
Are we not all just hunting
a little mid-week awe?
                                               Scurry, now:
all this shadow, we might never
catch it again. Collect yourselves
on dead grass, witness. The sun is
blinding beautiful, if you let it. Stop.
The earth burns. Yes -
                                               and there’s one
moon crossing the path of our sun and
there’s single-use sunglasses and
cereal boxes and colanders and
schoolbook science and a
collective giddy infectious
                                                       hope.
Are we not all just bugs after something
shared, and human, like a not-quite-
once-in-a-life-time solar event, or a
football worldcup, or reading about
droughts and feeling stomach-pit
despair.
               Stop. Commune with me and
pass it round: this.
                                   And sure, I’d look at it
directly. The sun, I mean. Wouldn’t we
all risk it, just this once, to share together
in a little blinding beauty.
                                                   And besides,
who here can say they don’t deserve
a little warmth on their cheek?

Not My Moon 
Lis Harrington


I wasn’t sure if her object permanence never quite developed or if she lost it at Mary and Bobs or the Bingo Hall. Replacing reality with two stones made of hyperbole and apathy, carried in her back pockets.

If you dropped them at the same time, the clink was indistinguishable. They could fall in unison – Olympic precision between these two bespeckled and smooth rocks.

Opening her left hand, palm down, with more rings than Midas – it dropped. She’d gasped, “We’ve NEVER had a winter like this, you wouldn’t believe it! The gully tree’s were creaking under the weight of the ice. I couldn’t even sleep, I was waiting for one to crash through the ceiling.”

“Is it as bad as the time your car doors froze shut in the driveway and you couldn’t get it started? I remember getting bit by that one.”

“That was nothing compared to this – it’s almost unnatural.”

Her right hand, with long nails she grew herself. Built from food which ‘didn’t need salt’ she
released the other.

“You just never mind. He didn’t mean anything by it. Jacky’s just old school.”

“Old school? I don’t think that’s the word I’d use to describe it.”

“What’s the word then?”

“Racist or rude or like actually shameful.”

“He actually grew up next to Fraser Rez, there’s nothing hateful in it. You know that’s not him
– he never got a degree like you. So, let’s just be kind to Jacky Dog.”

The clank of them always sounded the same whether they were on a pebble beach or her mint green bathtub, or Hill Top Diner on Thursdays. Plate or pie, it was hers to hear and mine to brace for.

When the moon turned red, she posted a blurry photo on Facebook captioned ‘is this the
pinot talking?’ 

When it stayed red until the next Sunday, Josephine sent her a picture ‘If the moon still looks red to you, drink two ceasars and call your bestie.’ I’m not sure if it helped her cope with the loss of her cat or the coyotes newly boastful and relentless yips but she forwarded it to me.

When we reached October, the brown leaves still keyed burgundy in our cherry moon. They gave the kids a half day from school so they could trick’r’treat before curfew. “Do you ever think about what winter will be like? The idea of all that snow glowing scarlet makes my front teeth twinge.”

A thud onto our cedar box of blankets.

“I really don’t think it’s that big of a change - the sun looked red during last summer’s fires in Fort Nelson. I don’t go out much at night, so I don’t notice it much.”

“You don’t notice it much?”

“Not much, sometimes I think I sleep better like this. The curfew keeps the roads quiet and there screaming’s dropped off since August.”

I picked up her stone, ready to pelt it back to her. Make it make a new sound, a bigger ripple. I continued, “When you picture a moonlit night over…the Fraser River, you don’t miss the
light? Being able to watch the current and.. feel welcome to be there?”

“I just think that people will always find a way to be unhappy. Why not be grateful? You can just go look at the river in the day – but don’t swim there it’s a death trap.”

“A death trap, worse than just being out after 6 now?” I handed apathy back to her, she hadn’t turned off the sky.

“I haven’t had any issues but Mo’ almost drowned in that river in 2013. He just had to jump off the bridge. They should just drain the whole thing but instead they keep putting up more
signs, like that’ll stop the kids!”

“Mmm…it’s four o’clock and my candy bowl probably needs a refill, I should head off. Love
you.”

Skittering across her front steps.

“Love you too – I hope none of those kids find razors or needles in their candy this year.”

Untitled

Nour


  Islands of strangers were never meant to instil fear;
an inner land made dry by endless drought
dredges up distant memories of seats
at unknown tables offered without debt or question    
    Closed eyes exhausted by an endless glare
turn the page of remembrance to the freedom fighters
worn out by what resistance demanded of them;
their eyelids, grown impatient of a tardy moon,
take it upon themselves to eclipse a sun that shines on them without yielding

The Community
Sophie Edwards


The plan for The Community had been to build the perfect community. A utopia with safe streets and warm houses and every belly full and kids with crisp, linen shirts and bright eyes that made them look like miniature 19th century sailors; it was not the first idea of its kind.

But then, Pierre knew that the best business proposals were rarely originals. With the venture capital funding raised, the proper permits obtained, the land purchased, and the first 100 sign ups secured, he was buoyed with hope, practically ecstatic with the knowledge that absolutely nothing could go wrong as he set out to build a world based purely around one mane’s vision of how society ought to function.

Sure, there had been that ghastly business in Los Angeles in the ‘60s, but Pierre’s idea was cleaner, purer. There would be no free love. Plus, drugs would be explicitly prohibited. Not only by law and signs hung at frequent intervals around the barbed wire perimeter of The Community, but also by dobermann pinschers guarding the entrance, their gnashing fangs poised for any poor unfortunate soul who dared to disobey.

The Community was designed to hold 300, but could carry a capacity of up to 400, if absolutely necessary. Within days of announcing the project, Pierre’s waiting list had already reached 10,000. This was all, of course, before the eclipse. Now, the waiting list has reached a billion and counting.

Sure, everyone is required to wear an itchy uniform, and yes, they must be inside their designated Pods by 10 PM and, of course, every single one of them became legally married to Pierre in an unbreakable contract upon entering The Community, but also, there, unlike everywhere else, there is still light.

When The Community-sponsored media asks Pierre on the nightly mandatory-watching news broadcast if he knew that the land he bought would be, impossibly, the only two mile radius that still got sunlight after the permanent eclipse blocked all but a sliver of solar power from penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere, he solemnly shakes his head no. This, of course, is also a lie.

Instructions For An Eclipse
Zoë Goodhead


Against the familiar swell of the seasons, resign yourself to something new
They created it in a lab to make you sit up and pay attention
It’s 1999 or 2081 or 2026 and we are all young, all old, all looking, wanting,
searching
Notice the bright, generous, performing truth of it all
Make it sacred by your noticing

Linger, take up the invitation to dwell
See all of London gathered in tight, bright spots between buildings
Tenderised and gazing, pulling the sky closer

Make the day unfamiliar
Let only half of the sun touch your wanting skin
Throw your eyeballs up into the sky and keep your feet on the ground

Open your face and your hands
Clasp onto the memory, knowing there is too much to carry
Take as much light as you can hold from this misshape, misstep, distorted
carnival mirror sun
See how something dead makes something alive more beautiful

Admire the sun for finding a way to be less and still be loved
See how the less creates more, more contours, more edges, a sharpness
After all of the giving of yourself, you worry you are not enough