after Gwendolyn Brooks My first summer teaching, the Head of Year says we got permission to have a disco for our forms, the real deal – kids to supply the music, their own cool tunes, and the DJs. Two boys set up lights so we nip off to the loos and change, teacher gear left […]
Poems
Boys
Last June my sister released a young cockerel in the university arboretum after it revealed its gender, crowing experimentally in a hoarse voice. Her husband used to wring the necks of the cocks while listening to hip-hop but he left. Now I’m at the garage filling up with petrol and pinned to the counter is […]
Berries
His touch is like the touch of a bandage, soft but slightly sinister, or berries, and being touched makes her feel good the way it feels good to feel helpless.
Cock Pheasant
He appeared in March, self-enchanted, rooting up hyacinths, staring into the greenhouse, through the kitchen window, a stray from woodlands where others roosted with that chucking sound he never uttered. Until one day he was on the roof outside the casement where I’m writing now, head tilting blazing bronze and green, an exultation, an opulent […]
The Flying African
Kum… yali, kum buba tambe – Virginia Hamilton The bird minstrels shrill vulgar mimetics of my folklore’s song. In whispered incantations, wings scar clean from my back, shake shadows like pools of night over slave quarters mangled with cotton. A mouth makes me a belonging, curves me clamoring into a half-circle like a brow cradling […]
Mother on Men
Mother what is a man? Put on your red hat, but don’t let a man see you wearing red. Mother what is a man? A man is a piece of burnt toast, a glass of vinegar. Never pour a man into your eye, never eat one at night. Mother what is a man? The white […]
Hair
I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made… – Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye You brushed her hair when your mother was ill, sunlit silk, hot sand slipping through fingers by the creek, not of burnt sugar spun in air. You stared at it, trying to make some […]
Cypress
Until now, I have not been able to do them as I feel them; the emotions that come over me in the face of nature can be so intense that I lose consciousness, and the result is a fortnight during which I cannot do any work. However, before leaving here [St-Remy] I mean to have […]
disappearing from victoria before the fire alert hits catastrophic
Squirrel
Swift and agile Sleek and prehensile – Skittering across bark And as dexterously over brick – Squirrel. The arch survivor – A thief in woodland A bandit of suburbia, Beautiful peanut pirate. You skim the rigging of Rotary washing lines And old telephone wires: Your sail-tail A Spinnaker of balance – A back garden acrobat. […]
[Rabbit]
In Portland we don’t use the word, we dance around it – furry things, we’d say, the furry things are in backfield again. As a child I only knew I should never look directly at them, the same way I knew not to look at the sun. It was wrong. It would hurt later on. […]
In Praise of Desolation
A sunlight-mottled river shunts its weight Towards the sea, having nowhere else to go; Even the evening’s syrupy light can’t glaze it Into something pretty. The days are slow, So I come back often to this crease in the city’s palm, Where you might see a rabbit stare from the gorse Then vanish as quick […]
watching the match at the field on berkeley road
Contains strong language next to the vineyard tree pub extra ordinaire free gravy on the side with all chips and running down the carvery yellow walls as brown shadow coats rusted telephone poles in something pretty home of the famous hooke team their sweaty shins and boys crying after hours behind the mccoll’s dogs pissing […]
At The Farm
Leaves falling through my open window, I hear thorn bushes rustling in the wind. I see trees dropping apples, Birds rustling their way through the thick branches To reach their nests. Eagles swooping down on my house, Searching for rats. Horses running from the barn. I hear the sudden noises of the cows mooing, Ants […]
Mould
They were here when I arrived; decadent strata of spots in rich orange, red, and green, a pointillist Zhangye Danxia on the ceiling of my student en-suite. I tried to kill them, but they came back, appearing out of nowhere like an absurd flash mob so I shower each morning under a hundred spiteful […]
Transformation
walking down the side of my house, i count the number of steps it takes to cross this white field of pebbles. for months, i could not touch the world. i only knew it through the window in my room. now the wind bounds past me like a dog. someone has overturned a stone in […]
myopic man
man heaves up stairs man pauses on step seventy-two man spits a prayer man ascends man gropes doorway man forgets keys man forgets keys in back pocket man pushes through man finds air man plunges onto rails man seeks the bars man has cold cheeks man catches a cloud man lets it go man plucks […]
The Christmas Pine
Once upon a time I stood With brothers and sisters in a wood. The old trees told me I had grown From a tiny seed inside a cone. The whispering wind was a friend of mine. She said that I would grow and shine. I grew up tall. I grew up high. I grew until […]
I Lost My Innocence in a Hospital Room, and No-One Handed It in
A Golden Shovel
IN WHICH PAPA (A SAILOR) GOES DEAF
Through the Lens of @realDonaldTrump: A Decade of Twitter Politics
so you want to talk about the ap*calypse
the end times in numbers: 4 horsemen 1 cancelled judgement day 1 giant rip through the sky 1 ocean brimming with plastic 1 people at risk remember self-care! pumice from the endless eruptions is effective on dry arms. steaming pyres also have a cleansing effect on skin, if you have any left. have a blackout […]
What I Learnt from Reading the News
after Kate Bingham I learnt that words don’t mean anything, That your hands do all the talking. I learnt that you don’t always have to tell the truth And I learnt that there’s always a loophole To weasel your way through. I learnt how to take offence at an inanimate object And how to play […]
someone calls me the c word and i respond
there are worse things to be. i could be, for instance, dying, or alive, but just enough to be taking up space. i could wade through a body that does not belong to me. yes, i could ravage, rumble, sour your milk, bite your children, poison your evening news. i could enlist my grandparents to […]
The Kroger Car-Loading Service
The grocery boy loaded her car with twenty free-range chicken breasts. She did not discover this until she was back home, after she had cloroxed every plastic Kroger bag he could’ve held. She hadn’t asked for twenty, she’d asked for two and a pack of paper towels. He hadn’t given her the paper towels and […]
my grandmother
my grandmother wears silk sarees woven with soft threads from India stained with rich indigo dye; tiny peacocks perch in the folds and flecks of gold adorn them like jewels sparkling with every movement. a red bindi sits between her brows – she’s a queen. but in Tesco she’s an obscurity in the spice aisle. […]
Polaris
slit through the belly and you will find hot air, slippery fat, rabbit bones, a beer belch swallowed. ask him what he has done, and he will say / nothing. flush out the acid and you will see what it has ravaged. what remains of the forest is its rot; of its birds, a feather. […]
A Little Bit of Poland in Sudbury Hill
Dear Lord, I thank you for the polski skleps – the strip-lights’ thrum above the counters thick with meat that prune-faced women slap as they walk past; fondle the tomatoes ripe, round, earth-dusty in their plastic crates; eye up the bargains, the joyous promotions – Promocja! Oferta! One-time special discount rates! – and go through […]
The Sound of Shakespeare’s Women
If Juliet was silenced amongst a patriarchal nightmare and Lavinia was two hands down with no tongue to tell their tale and Ophelia was driven to madness with no sense left to speak and Cordelia was shunned by her father, her pointless words falling on deaf ears and Desdemona’s desperate truth was shouted down by […]
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⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎⁎ All the slow summer long……………………£9.99 I have been living……………………………£6.90 in a glass jar of anxiety……………………..£16.90 and dreading…………………………………£7.68 a day in August………………………………£6.57 when a devious envelope……………………£12.90 with a barbed paper tongue………………….£3.76 will slither through the door…………………£2.46 to determine my fate…………………………£6.83 with only a few………………………………£5.80 letters: grades that might……………………..£5.45 be as sharp as blades………………………….£9.90 or as […]
Julia
after Louisa Adjoa Parker Instead of you dying, why don’t you come round to ours. We’ll tell you we’re ready by calling your home and hanging up after three rings. We’ll hand you folded card takeaway menus, pretend to look through them then reel out the usual; garlic beansprouts with mushroom curry, as if you […]
Navajo Roads
A thick perfume of hot leather seats hangs heavy in the air, which drags out scraping melodies through an open window and I – hand on the wheel – use up a little more of man’s hydrocarbon quota. I sweat like a pig; the acrid fluid could fill a lager can to its corroded brim. […]
Found
Contains strong language d’y’see your man there, in the – in the grounds of the city hall, d’y’hear he used to be a slaver? kept slaves ‘n’ that, sold thum as well i think i read. an’d’y’hear there’s a bunch of themins – themins at that owl protest the other week – want ‘im taken […]
The Leshan Giant Buddha
After Marilyn Chin step step step to the giant Buddha made with the blood of three generations and the eyes of the monk Hai Tong made to calm the turbulent waters so that the ships could sail smoothly make your sacrifices to the Buddha because nothing comes without a price step step step to […]
Barcodes
the Race Card
People always excuse racism with the phrase “Stop using the race card” as if The exploitation of blacks The use of an infamous six letter word Is all A game Like I could use my race card to Make happy families of All those who have lost A brother A sister A parent A child […]
Love Poem to Young Offenders Support Workers
Here, where the streetlights have seen more than any expert, there is a currency in the green ghosts of cheap chains hidden under collars, or in knowing somebody’s brother from school, or in the phone numbers of people who know how to scoop up boys spilling out onto pavements, their limbs limp as weeds, without […]
CANBURY GARDENS AS A PROSE POEM DOMINATED BY THE WORD ‘LIKE’
Contains strong language
Brown Girl
Contains strong language After Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’ “The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.” – President William McKinley practice your Nepali three times a day; don’t ever forget your mother tongue; always speak English outside the house or people will think you’re a terrorist; here’s how to fold dough into a […]
My Home is Full of Voices
after the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2020 winners This summer, they arrived spilling from boxes. They embraced each other from across continents, throwing and catching each other’s echoes at the door, fizzing with new-born verve. They are trying to tell us something. The hallway filled. They filed through the front door, […]
In My Wallet
How to Flirt at Your Best Friend’s Funeral
Content warning: grief
Semantics
Content warning: rape
in response to eliezer wiesel’s night
this is the moment skeletons became atheists. gold lodged in the back of throats and stuck, rigor mortis like you never had a chance. and maybe the soup tastes like corpses, or maybe the soup tastes like god. or like angels, and cracks in the barbed wire. because skeleton is a synonym for survivor, in […]
How to Kill a Tiger
The sky reddening like an unbruised body— and you, gone for days now, calcified in this unshed nightmare where the tiger is closing its teeth over your wrist again, dozens of rabbit carcasses littering the halls again, tiger slipping quiet through the nights, […]
get out of my face
Somewhere out there is a statue of me where my face isn’t as long, my sadness shorter. I meet with her head-on. I tell her to turn in the direction of the power ballads and the attractive folks that sing them. I’ve just seen a face, says Paul McCartney in the middle of 1965, and […]
the complexities of water
Scaffolding
Halfway through the horror movie, the lights give out, the whole city held under a blanket. Turning the other cheek. Some phantom hand finds mine. I will learn to love you softly is what the house would say, its belly emitting a quiet dust rumble, drops in the kitchen sink like fingers drumming a wooden […]
Pins
I The mini liberators of women, hoisting those hems to the Heavens, giving their legs room to breathe. II The silver capped scholars, keeping those iridescent specimens in place for little curious eyes. III The diligent sewers’ stabilisers, holding together linen squares so they can stitch their designs to life. IV The silent supporters, presenting […]
Body
Body lies on the bottom step. How did it get there? we ask. Body is bloody. Hair matted. Nails dirty. Body ’s hand falls near the light. We are glad Body has made no mess. Clean fall. No Body would notice. What should we do? Body says rug. Wrap me […]
Joan of Arc Gives Me a Buzz Cut, or Lux Venit in Nomine Vocis
Joan of Arc and I lay head-to-head in the wash of a meadow frothing Queen Anne’s lace like a corrupted lung. Her fingers dabbling my palms like water, that martyr and I speak of our own voices: mine, stolen; hers given like a sack of entrails. Did the voices twitch, I ask, did they wriggle […]
Exposure, Part II
For Wilfred Owen Contains strong language our bodies ache on the streets where we rattle plastic cans for change we watch the flocks of low drooping eyes scuttle by like brambles in the north wind we have become part of the scene patient hopeful crying out but nothing happens on the corner a preacher […]
Julius Caesar Visits the NIST-F1 Atomic Clock
20:30 from Stockport
I saw Humphrey Bogart in a train station, Crewe, three o’clock in the morning, and he looked as faded and grey as I felt stumbling half asleep off the late service. When I was ushered out the doors, he was just there by the taxi rank, leant up on a pillar, smoking, lit up […]
What is Happening to Jesus of Nazareth and What You Can Do to Help: a Thread
You may know Jesus. That preacher/teacher/healer/magic man with the clear silt skin. You may have seen him around town, raising the dead and making friends. Maybe he cleaned up your acne, maybe he showed you the gold humming of God. Take a look at his Tumblr: @carpentryqween. 1/? Jesus is a rebel leader/activist/socialist/pacifist and last […]
Rosalind on 2mg Estradiol a day
“Do you not know I am a woman?”(Act III, scene ii, As You Like It) My lover and I no longer speak. We leave notes in the mist on one another’s eyes. Once, he carried me through fields of sheep when I began to doubt that softness could be born. My lover doesn’t see the […]
Frankenstein
Delhi, 2020 Delhi today is like a dried-out battleground / after one final revolution. Sentries in khaki thrash / young men on peculiar vehicles / for something I don’t understand. I hide my sewed-up face / in dark alleys; people look at me from the other side of their windows / scared. I’d have […]
John Dee at the Apple Store
Show me your teeth, God. Tonight, at the Apple Store under the unshut moon. Visit me tonight, God. Fog this spirit mirror with your Word — blind me with this new handheld eclipse. Oh, but my head sings with standing so long as the marrow of this sun-bleached bone. Church as mirage. Along its aisles […]
Ferenc Rákóczi in the Pantry
Ferenc II Rákóczi was a Hungarian aristocrat who led rebellions against the Habsburg empire in the early 18th century. He is widely considered a national hero in Hungary.”Rákóczi” is also the name of a popular Hungarian breakfast salami. Dear, kind Ferenc: I am in love with your meat-printed face. I fan this last pious slice, […]
Home birthing to Snoop Dogg ⇄ ⇅
Her Knitting
A thought forms in my right fist until my thumb and little finger stretch to make the beat of a line. But then I see my mother’s hand as she put down her knitting, half-closed her left eye and walked her thumb and little finger across my girl’s chest. She never used a pattern or […]
Halfway Lunar
Based on the legend of Chang’e Winter: the living room gleaned of moonlight. A city slumped anemic over its knees, milky and putrid like a wound unsutured. I used to scrape rust from kitchen counters and drink fat until my tongue swelled gibbous, large enough to swallow the November sky and your rice fields gone […]
Dionysus Creating Strongbow Dark Fruit
is thinking of you at those just-teenage get togethers at Rebecca’s, hoping to feel grown but betraying your youth by gripping your glammed-up fruit shoot too tightly. Dionysus creating Strongbow Dark Fruit (and the Aldi knock-off too) is thinking of you at family BBQs, where you are fourteen and disgusting and need something to do […]
Self-Portrait as Rapunzel, in which the Tower Represents Grief
And I never saw my mother again. All my stars fell palms-first into the thorns outside my small glassless window. No door, no stairs. I just found myself, there. My thimble. My long smoking rifle and I, the smoke softly ceasing to exist. It takes seventy years to wash my hair. She did it in […]
half woman half snake
Şahmaran tells me behind her bar, don’t trust a man if you have to tell him but you have sisters and a mother, too. don’t trust them if they think clearing the table is a compromise don’t trust the family father who thinks his sons rather fear him don’t trust the boy who pulls your […]
Rules of Survival for the Girl as White as Snow
Don’t let your widowed father remarry— that is, if you still want to wake up at dawn to the sound of your heart beating between your ribs. Remember: stepmothers are evil and vain and bloodthirsty and own talking magic mirrors capable of making calculated analyses of your beauty. Remember: all that […]
Agape
A boy: small thighs, coat aged into feathers, walks in through the cold. Undressing his wet clothes I find breadcrumbs in the folds of skin. He unwinds the limbs of an apple. Milk slips from his childish lilt. I weep as he sucks the glass like an orphan. I bring him my blankets and I […]
Midas’ Mother
after Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife My boy went down to the river and came back bronzed man. Sneer frozen on his handsome face, eyes unblinking, tongue of gold, contempt held Sharp (between his iron cavities). We were unlike. He’d twisted his heart into alloy pockets as cold as the river in the winter-time. […]
Philtatos. Most Beloved.
He feels like he could eat the world raw. I feel like our happy ending is another broken promise. like the sun will set when he does, when the roar of his name across battlefields is not enough; it never was I feel like his hair will never look the way it does now. like […]
The Belly of the Wolf
is empty of children, ripped cardboard, happy endings. A flesh rimmed cavern, sinews strung under the heart like harp strings. Tanks rumble under my feet when the wolf talks, gutter-pulsing in skin. I lie on my back & pretend this hollow is a spaceship, primed for a red sky. The acid river foams down my […]
Miss Medusa
Contains adult themes Medusa died this year. Didn’t you hear? You can’t turn men to stone If they never look at you. Come on, She said, My eyes are up here! Medusa cut her hair short, Squeezed into yoga pants And filed her fangs The Thursday night Before it happened Because she’d read an article […]
Honeyed
On long evenings, the Grans will embellish on this: how a branch of our family, the Mead bloodline, is infused, they say, with a strange sixth sense. They take a sip and begin. How my aunt, even now talks to her late husband, gets his opinion while running a bath or watering geraniums. And the […]
Lockdown Afternoons
The empty beer cans are left neat on the garden bench; the bench where he sits outside at the front of the house, because that is where the sun shines in the afternoon. He must need that, I think, to sit in the sun, to feel its warmth on his skin. I see him, […]
60, 71, 30.18, SW 1, Little Rain
I will die on a day of fair weather, pray to God. A last log of air. I will lay aside rain. If I had learned to shut light in a cylinder! My eye was always other. I saw blue where God made red. No matter. An end to noting patterns of the sky. A […]
Hoar Frost
i.m. John Hume There are days I am back there, Six years old, with my sibling, damp haired, at the open fire, on beanbags (one Superman, one Victoria Plum). We are swaddled in blankets, cereal bowls loaded with Maltesers, Fruit Pastilles and Cadbury’s Buttons. I’m craving the A team, my brother Knightrider. BA Baracus won’t […]
Look-see
after Hokusai’s Sazai Hall at the Temple of the Five Hundred Arhats you hold my hand not noticing the lavender in my other hand the sky is not blue mother like my ignored love token at last I can rest untangle the cutting strap oh my sore shoulders we are invisible here with mountains more […]
When you were sewing with your perfect vision what did you stitch?
If I step back three times, to my mother’s mother’s mother, I know only that you could thread a needle without glasses when you were old, ah, yes, it is true that you had two husbands, one died from a fall when riding, what happened to the other? hush, child, things happen that you […]
Vitreous Humour
after Ovid Twice upon a time my fluid mother born of water said no and no to my poor father living with sheep: all rivers screamed like Munch’s blue-black fjords and the lambs’ tongues twisted towards the orange sky. I was a product of an inter-terrestrial marriage, pasture- blood. Animals hated me, especially sheep, and […]
Yellowhammer
All other birds are silent when the football season meets the Sunday morning summer. A lone cow descants to raucous shouts, the herd loll in a dappled circle. Halftime. You perch upon the hawthorn hedge, head bouncing sunshine. A little bit of bread and no cheese. You deserve more— bring out the Stilton, ruffle your […]
The Skylark and I
The skylark and I have traded places, I reel and churr all day and she’s great with paperwork, a natural shredder. It was difficult, at first to master a voice that pulses so close to the heart, where each lung draws its song independent from the other, holding air and refrain in the same breath, […]
I Hear You Singing
When I first heard you sing, my heart turned over, not knowing, then, how long I’d be your lover, nor what sense it made to speak of forever. But here you are today: wife, mother, grandmother. Fortune, hard work and love held us together. I hear you singing, and my heart turns over.
De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da
Stook griiind, stook griiind: the pulse extends waves to thrust air down her throat into wizened lungs. Her brain sucks oxygen for its miserly self storing it for her last memory of Shang-A-Lang. It robs muscle so she is still, it thieves liver so she pees brown, it purloins kidneys so toxins thrive. Her mobile […]
Bubble
I can’t remember a time there wasn’t the constant plop, plop from the demijohns fermenting against the far wall. Or the TV so loud – even louder when the ads come on – hammering Mrs Hall’s ears till her hearing-aids screech; fingernails on a blackboard, and Mr Hall eating his packet of cheese and onion […]
Hear her life
The beap The scream The beep The heat The heart The drip The breath The beat The air The hour The light The blue The line The pause –
Reliquary
I cannot keep you, but I can carve you a wooden box, engrave it with your name; I will not smother it in gold, cobalt blue enamel, set it with rubies, pearls; I’ll make an aperture of rock crystal to let the light in. Inside this box, I’ll place no giant knuckle bone, no vial […]
Airlocks
The tundish is a trickling lantern valve once ignored, now a vital sign as a city of pipes holds its breath, air stacks compressing as water expands to fill the cylinder tower. One lock releases, another blocks. Aim your phone at the hidden underside and answers appear in the camera flash etched on silver labels, […]
Blueprints for a future self
Your voiceover delivers instructions for the correct use of industrial-sized 3-D printers, one last record of your speaking aloud. We picture a white-coated technician watching your coded animations jolt to the tempo as you explain how to smooth the flow of layers shaping liquid into solid form, how inside these glass walls hours of programming […]
The First Bird of Dyslexia
Morning has Broken, said the hymn like the first morning; and (for me) was unreadable even when pounded out with heavy hammers mor- / -ning / has / bro- / -ken Teacher would perform the trick of lifting a sound and a sherbet lemon from a high shelf – mor, he would say – cracking […]
The Danger is
I can’t hear them coming up behind me whether a vehicle or bicycle without a bell. If I tried to turn or look over my shoulder I’d tumble to tarmac or cobble so I keep going yard by yard until I can side-step out of the way, let them pass. The danger is they may […]
Confession
I remember how sunny the day was pretending to be, how bright it was in the kitchen how the water I was pouring from the blue mug to the red mug, to the blue mug, to the red mug was whispering it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright how it dragged my sleeves how the conversation […]
Arion
Arion, who created the dithyramb, who invented tragedy, to whom we owe the fact that to this day fifty satyrs sing the chorus to our every song, would never have agreed to board the ship without a retinue, would not have fallen for a lesser ruse or succumbed to a bag over the head – […]
Washing the body
I was the coward. The others were calm. They knew what they had to do. Our cousin Zen was there, she had done this before. Zen is a happy person. She made us giggle in the waiting room, while the funeral director was telling us everybody have a sense they will pass about say maybe […]
from traces
It is forbidden to spit on cats in plague-time. – Albert Camus, The Plague, translated by Stuart Gilbert i. mark You have ruined your eyes reading by candlelight, and singed your wings – white feathers smudged like Ash Wednesday, in this, the year of the plague. You have saved her voice and when she speaks […]
a constitution
…grape vines actually perform better when nutrients are scarce… These conditions cause the vine to focus more energy on survival and less energy on growing grapes… and each grape has more character, concentration, and quality. – Winefolly.com The harder an entity has to work for something, the greater it will be rewarded in the end. […]
Treading Water
When I find myself slipping, I hold on and remember what the canal taught me: No journey is a straight line. The last time we walked here together, I reminded you that not long ago this canal cut a dark scar through the Pennines, from Manchester to Sowerby Bridge. Its future slippery, almost sunk. But […]
Landscape of wounds
by Suhrab Sirat, translated by Claire Carlotti I am the night; my soul, my gaze, my dream are the worst wounds While in the shadowed mirror, my lips brush against pursed wounds. Autumn bleeds through each season, my Libra upsets Sagittarius And the arrow strikes Scorpio, releasing venom from burst wounds. The bull, weary and […]
Land of Wounds
by Suhrab Sirat, translated by Crystal Peng I am soul gaze, ghost, & slumber my nights are sullen, wounded when I kiss myself in dim mirror my lips are gushed & swollen, wounded I am years stitched […]
Woundistan
by Suhrab Sirat, translated by Jhermayne Ubalde My soul, my hopes, my dreams – they bleed My reflection, stained red with the taste of an estranged lover’s kiss Autumn bleeds into centuries Scorpio: dancing with death Libra: pulling back the drawstring Sagittarius: embracing its result The world sways on a bovine axis of fury painted […]
Realm of Wounds
by Suhrab Sirat, translated by Divya Mehrish I am soul, eyes my shadow haunts my dreams wounds these dreams: nights of wet mirrors; lips pressed against reflection; I kiss my lips, I kiss my eyes. My lips are wounded. I am a time […]
Bleeding Home (Wounded)
by Suhrab Sirat, translated by Annie Lane My soul, my sight, my shadow, my night, my every dream – all are bloodied. I kissed my reflection, the mirror split – My lips are wounded. A venomous year, an autumn year. Each constellation ploughs into the next and My Scorpio is wounded. The bull’s horns shake […]