Location: Redmires Court, Salford

Will you swap me your wild flowers for my graffiti and tags?
Or your lowing pastured cattle for the bark of my stray dogs
Trade me your peace & quiet for the drone of my traffic
Your organic and natural, my synthetic and plastic

Give me your fresh air in return for my fumes
And I’ll swap you Morris Dancers for my bangin’ tunes
Trade your District & General for my A&E
Prefer Agricultural College or Polytechnic University?

Give up your green lanes for my gum-scarred streets
Or the sound of your birdsong for my siren’s wail
Have my sink estates not your landed gentry
My Iron Duke not your Plough & Flail

I’ll swap you my skate park for a memorial to the dead
Your Post Office or my Aleef News
My bagel for your brown-bread
Your one-stop-shop for J.S. Sainsbury
Little England in return for racial diversity

I’ll take your depression if you’ll have my stress
My Time Out & What’s On, your Order of Service
W.I. or Band-on-the-Wall
My E.N.O. for your Village Hall

24/7 or quiet isolation
Horse & Hound vs. Sleaze Nation
Urban Chic / Rustic Charm
E.U. subsidies or a car alarm

A 20-mile drive or my black cab ride
Will it be tower block or barn for our teenage suicide?
Is it Gucci & Prada or Barbour and wax?
Want your tenement farmers or my poll-tax

Would you give up your life for one that looks like mine?
Drink a pint of local bitter or sip New World fine wine
Want to trade?
Want to swap?
Want to give it a try?
No?
No,
You’re right,
Neither do I.

Neil J. Donald is Manchester born and bred – Chorlton and Salford – now exiled to Heywood. He says: ‘What defines Manchester is what gives its children strength.’

Location: Piccadilly Gardens

on a wooden bench
facing the sun
a man
blind from birth
who can now see
and a man
who could see
but is now blind
sit side by side
and talk.

Peter Hartey co-founded and runs Poetica, a writing forum based in Central Library, Manchester.

Location: Market Street

Gum on the pavements
Film on her teeth
Tight jeans don’t fit
On this stretch of street

Pretension prevention
Saliva is decadence
But if I want to use language
There’s plenty of precedence

Mouth-washed and side-saddled
Youth killed the coronets
With jovial vitriol
Horns don’t fit the dialect

Twee-bees, glass-smashers
Mods, moshers, drones
A sport-socked strip-mine
A place to call home

Joseph Alford is an unemployed polymath-lite. Resident of Levenshulme since 1981. http://rustavenue.blogspot.com/

Location: Berwick Avenue, Heaton Mersey

I have always been here. Like the cobbles around the church and the old river that kicks up a stink every summertime. I am part of this place, like a stone that the grass has grown over. This is Heaton Mersey. It is my place. I have always been here.

When I was six I lived on Berwick Avenue. I fed the horse in the field next to my house. He would come to me slowly, bending his head over the wooden fence, towering above me like a big white ghost. I would bring a fresh green apple every day. The horse would bend down and take the apple, with teeth like tombstones. For a moment we would lock eyes.

I could see the horse’s field from my bedroom window. His name was Polo. I’d imagine myself grabbing Polo’s mane and riding around the field. I wanted to fly through the air on his back, to be free.

Now the children are protected like delicate glass and the field is gone. In the place where the horses grazed there are a hundred houses standing erect like soldiers. Guarding their residents from the past, whilst underneath their patios horse prints are embedded in the soil. I do not know who sleeps in that bedroom now, someone else who has no horses to watch.

There are cars everywhere now. Not like when I was young. I would sit on the back of my mum’s black bicycle, wobbling over the bumps on our way to the shops. I’d push my hands through the stripy plastic strips that hung over the door of Duffy’s butchers shop. Mr Duffy the butcher would greet us with a plump smile. There would be a dog behind the wooden slats, salivating. I would watch as Mr Duffy took out his knife, his fat pink hands as red as the meat he was about to cut.

The shop has gone now. They have hair salons and betting shops instead, not even a post office. It is all gone. The orchards filled with pear trees. The Linx golf course where we went sledging before the bulldozers came and transformed it into the Linx housing estate.

Location: Sharp Street (off Rochdale Road), Ancoats

She was hiding from Derek’s wife,
Monday night’s Cora, balcony in Salford Quays,
breeze blowing her scarlet negligee.
In her background viewers could see
Manchester’s tallest tower penetrating blue.
Out of my window I could see it too.

Now me and Liz meet in its Cloud 23.
I buy her expensive white wine
and necklaces bearing LM.
She slips them over her plunging neckline.
She wears dark glasses. We keep our backs turned.
She points out the Rovers Return.

Back at my flat we look up at the Tower
with its winking red night-lights.
We guess which footballers might be home.
I put a match to her Benson & Hedges.
We look down at magpies
nesting in the derelict pub’s chimney.

When the builders have gone,
she joins me at the Juliet balcony.
Figures in the flats opposite
look like mute actors behind screens
until some point, some stare,
some signal, some wave.

David Keyworth is part of the Poetica group, which meets fortnightly at Central Library. He has been published in Manchester-based Rain Dog and other magazines. He has always watched Coronation Street but has only gotten to know Manchester in the last few years

Location: Hawthorn Lane, between Chorlton and Stretford

The branches shake themselves,
Like a freshly dipped dog.
A hundred thousand glistening baubles
Shower down and crack open on the ground,
Spilling out a shiny confusion.
Ponds now stand
Where paths once ran;
The river and road course forwards as one.
Puddles hold dark secrets,
Their depths difficult to navigate
In the tunnel of trees.
At the end: bright light.
We emerge, blinking, roused from a dream.
The rain has gone, here comes the sun.

Clare Conlon lives in Chorlton and spends her time writing, editing and drying off in pubs after exploring the rainy city on her trusty Shopper, Celia. http://wordsandfixtures.blogspot.com/

Location: Strangeways

Smoke plumes from the pepperpot
I never noticed that before
I thought they hanged men there
A beacon to warn us of the enemy within

They could not keep the fires burning
As the deadman walked the sooty steps
The hangman would choke
But the smell reminds us
That the Devil waits beneath the trap

And the ascent to the drop
From the highest point here
Conspires with cathedral spire
To scrape the sky
And glimpse the face of a God so near

If only we’d mend our strangeways

Steve Hunt is North Mancunian born and bred. Sometimes he writes, sometimes he reads, sometimes he makes pictures.

Location: 31 Landcross Road, Fallowfield

Midsummer, 9am,
bristled bees argue
with window glass,
seeking escape,
the first heat of day.

The radio talks on,
too loud, exhaling
the feel-good,
vapid words feathering
across a continuum of
dyed hair, cigarette ends,
dog barks, tabloid screeds,

grass-cool alleyways.
Buried in the back streets,
history matures in
rubber-mouthed jars, dusted,
derelict, boiling with ants,
mouldering flowers,

and down this path you disappear,
seeking to feel without
the complication of thought.

Sion Steadman studied English language and literature at the University of Manchester and enjoys every return visit to the city

Location: Laburnum Way, Cheadle Heath

Mother shrieks at daughter,
‘Be ladylike!’
Old lady on daily Bingo trek
stumbles over
delinquent pavement;
no-one heeds her screams.
Teenagers screech
past on stolen motorbikes:
no helmets. If brains
strike pavement,
will it matter?
I see my world and
weep at the
stench of
hope gone
awry.

Linda Cosgriff is a wife, mother and Open University graduate. She hopes to start an MA in creative writing in 2010. She wrote this poem during the Rainy City Stories writing workshop at Stockport Art Gallery

Location: Philip’s Park, Clayton, Manchester

At first it was exciting, so much to look at, so much to talk about. It was on this daily walk that at seventeen and nineteen they had planned out their life together, wandering aimlessly through nooks and crannies, only their conversations leading the way.

But now they were accustomed to this walk, first among the grave stones and beneath the boughs of the bare willow tree and then over the bridge by the wood ear and on to the paths that were now covered with decomposing leaves.

He didn’t need to mention the slim trees that sprouted so close to one another they hugged, he looked in their direction and her eyes followed knowingly. She no longer stopped abruptly begging him to ‘wait, wait a moment and listen’ to the water carousing by, she merely slowed her pace and paused and his ears pricked up to hear what might once have been a body, disinterred from its grave, being swept downstream.

They shuddered now, recomposed and commenced their walk into Tulip Valley. From here they could see the great dome that rose and fell in the distance. They marvelled at it and wondered if it was warm and firm, like a great big belly. They each placed their hands across their own and breathed deeply.

She caught a glimpse of the magpies; she wished she carried his child. She had held her stomach longer than was usual, he was thinking it now too. He longed for his seed to grow in her. He shifted through her in the dark at night; it was comforting to know that they both wanted this.

Then each month the blood emptied from her. They knew the words by heart: it would happen, they would try again when it was over.

They walked at an easy pace on to the embankment by the trees. He observed a brown leaf that had curled in to a tight cocoon. It hung alone. He wanted to be inside it, encased in its soft papery skin. She saw him looking. ‘What is it?’ she asked, inviting him out of the silence with which it had momentarily provided. He gestured toward it and his sad brown eyes hung there for a moment longer. She peered at it and then gently took his hand, leading him away. They crossed over the green boggy land and left by the usual gate.