June 2026: an Aviator’s Guide to Exploration

Five by five. You have tugged in and spluttered out air that is unfamiliar. Tell me about the postcards in your carry-bag that you have not yet written on. You are the postman to the constellations. Home  pulls at your pocket like a bouquet of tiny fingers, wrapped around the winch of a wishing-well. Tell me about movement and diagrams and pictures. Tell me about the air that isolates the uneven, the winter within your lungs, like fingers curling toward the death of heat. Tell me about the languages and speech that are tied up within your memory. Sound it out, speak slowly. How many people and places have come together to conceive the curious thing that you are? Do tell me, (over tea and cakes that we really must find the recipes for, for how will we ever taste them again?) and I’ll tell you mine. 

Aviator, have you ever seen your name stamped out across all there is to be seen? Tell me about the winds that have untamed your hair. Each wind that has heaved in from the West like a wistful old sigh, to prove that it has taken your eyes from here to everywhere. You must have an awful lot to write about. 

Turning around is futile, aviator! You’re much too far from home.

Emmanuelle Kate.

SUBMISSIONS CLOSE JUNE 25TH.

Exploration (noun)

1. Examination, investigation, scrutiny, study 

2. The action of travelling to or around an uncharted or unknown area for the purposes of discovery and gathering information