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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

The first I noticed was your thumbnails, large, round and flat, like two plates They were marked with yellowed ridges and covered in grime where they met the cracked tips of your thumbs I couldn’t help looking Perhaps I had sensed it already, in a mere handshake that morning Perhaps that handshake had convinced me to stay and watch you skin the sheep that afternoon?   Not the stench of the two-day-dead ewe, the scuds of wool fallen to the air like a dandelion clock, nor the skin slow peeling back, revealing, not blood-lust   I was so taken by your grimy thumbnails And, I was crouching so close in that lost field one afternoon We had hauled the ewe out of a pit Found dead the previous dawn, her eyes gone, pecked out by the crows The ewe, one of three Frieslandto start up a dairy herd, had been brought on to the island a week before; no one could get near her, not time enough even to give her a name Some thought: she may have starved herself or she sure perished of thirst, seemingly terrified since her arrival, shuddering at the hill edge against a stone wall The farmers think otherwise: redwater, blackleg they mumble like proverbs or curses   She was already well swollen, her legs shooting out like on plastic models of farm animals Rigor mortis sets in almost immediately We had hauled her out of a pit with a blue rope around her shockstuck legs A newly-dug pit crammed with bits to bury: a pram frame, rusted so (And, we had always planned to repair it) Oil barrels: two; rusty too I forget what else I remember that the pit was not as deep as I had expected   Nor had I expected you to reach for some latex gloves, to stretch the opaque white rubber over your hands, your grimy nails, to then pass me a pair And a knife   Dead two days! a neighbouring farmer had laughed The sheep were only there a week, and on the third day he had come round, bringing his ram to cover them: a

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

READ NEXT

feature

April 2017

The White Review Short Story Prize 2017 Shortlist (US & Canada)

feature

April 2017

click on the title to read the story   1,040 MPH by Alexander Slotnick   Abu One-Eye by Rav...

feature

Issue No. 18

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 18

This is the editorial from the eighteenth print issue of The White Review, available to buy here.    In 1991...

fiction

March 2015

House Proud

Amelia Gray

fiction

March 2015

It’s harder to leave your burning home after you’ve spent so much time cleaning its floors. Watching those baseboards...

 

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