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 […]
Poems
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 […]
Wound Without End
by Suhrab Sirat, translated by Gemma Craig-Sharples My lips on mine in the mirror, wounded A comfortless kiss for my soul, wounded His arrow pins me to poisoned autumn And the year snags: seasons wounded Earth trembles on the raging bull’s horns with A hitch of heart, this heart, my heart, wounded I have no […]
Wound-i-stan Ghazal
by Suhrab Sirat, translated by Charlotte Hughes I am sleep, a body gazing down at its own shadow during the night of wounds. I am lips the color of the red dawn that kiss the mirror, love their wounds When each season turns to autumn—Sagittarius shot through, Libra uneven. Venom eats Scorpio inside out like […]
headwound
by Suhrab Sirat, translated by Ellora Sutton Gaze: the night is bright and light-wounded. The mirror shatters. My kissing lips are wounded. I am a calendar, days split and divided by barbed wire. I am Libra, Sagittarius, Scorpio, wounded. My sloppy red heart, heart, heart, this raging bull is wounded. I have no footprint. My […]
Tammy
For Tammy the hamster I think perhaps nature made you Soft for us, because there’s no sane Reason for you to wear a cloud for a coat. If there is in your littlenesses Some ancient, statue-high message I think it is not a lofty one. You speak more in the warm Thereness you bring on […]
Ode to Blu Tack
Speck of skyslide, Penicillium mold grown in zero gravity you have no shape to speak of. Semi-precious adhesive, you belong with beautiful things. Ancient Egyptians would have placed you with gold inlaying death masks with Blu Tack and fingerprints understanding that a soul takes many forms, each carrying the same weight. O […]
Ode to a Desk Fan
You, my favourite soprano, sizzling egg white, caged bird with metal tongue, the moon reflecting the air of the room back to itself. I turn you on in the morning and you don’t stop, spinning gold from the open window, festooning my face with the curious fingers of unsure ghosts. You are a crystal ball. […]
Joy Museum
Content warning: references to suicide Even after it all, I want to live so badly that I lock the doors, I turn the gas stove off and lift my head from the bathwater. I return the insignificant calls and write letters to thank other people for living too, for waking up early and making bread […]
To the Ladybird of Uber
I am sorry for tearing off my mask (your holiday home) and shouting what the – as you huffed on car carpet but I remember how strong your red bauble back gleamed with its dilated pupil pattern and – at the rolled window – how reluctantly you allowed the wind to touch your line-drawn legs […]
Ode to Pubes
Black Hydra jungle vines, curly and thick. Cut off the head and three more grow back. Dear pubes, I am supposed to despise you. Mow the lawn until I am smooth, pure and woman again. Rip you from the root like some unholy and unfeminine weed. Perhaps I did this once – forgot about cavewomen […]
After the Funeral
I wrote an ode to the dust motes kicked up like the smoke of her body. O light and pixie-ish things, disturbing the still of the air and mind. Giving us leave to crack the silence. Gifting us the salt to cry with. O catching of grief in my throat: an excuse for the broken […]
Ode to a Dog Howling in the Background of Zoom Class
Sometimes I think my whole little world revolves around me— my four walls of paste and foamboard, plywood turrets and hollow molding, all held up by a nail from the eighties. Each day a reflection of the next. The same food—apples pierced in the center, white bread, orange cheese stuck together […]
ode to the fridge in our student house
you are the most non-judgmental cuboid. o pockmarked monolith, not full of stars but carrots (accidentally bought in bulk), and buttery light that melts across the floor like a sunrise in the kitchen at 1am. i love my home but i miss your magnetism, your souvenir fridge magnets worn like medals, princess leia declaring to […]
The Angel Gabriel Visits Mary in Bedlam (Ecce Ancilla Domini!)
after Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini!’ content warning: mental ill health, self-harm suicide look at the dove so wide a suicide against the wall wrap it up in the blue cloth I’ve been keeping it unwrinkled for such a purpose long blue tongue of heaven little feathers […]
The Piano
after Rebecca Horn’s sculpture ‘Concert for Anarchy’ Of all the stupid things I bought with your money worst of them was the piano, a big black grand far too big for our cottage, seeming to tip the floor, upend what little light made it through our windows. I had every intention of learning how to […]
Angel’s Flight
after Millard Sheets’s painting ‘Angel’s Flight’ Only just May and hot as hell at the top of Angel’s Flight behind the glass that keeps you from the sky, your hip jutting out like a threatened cliff, that malted milkshake dress declaring every bump you’ve ever ridden roughshod over, cradling the vacancy inside – too many […]
Millais’ Return of the Dove
after John Everett Millais’ painting ‘Return of the Dove to the Ark‘ I. and the girls have been floating in this barn for almost a year remembering and forgetting […]
You Bring Out the Bourgeois in Me
after Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Arched Figure’ Please don’t wake me. Walking on my hands through dream-suburbs of green belt, the gabled house-fronts of Ickenham, I must slumber on through volumes of obsession-diaries, feeding myself with my clever girl’s fingers, tongue grown too big for my mouth. Lying in my stockinette of lard, stitched pig, I feel […]
Waging Peace
after Cai Guo-Qiang’s ‘Gunpowder Art’ the rumour unfurled like ink in water that a ten day-war was imminent on the first day we woke to small gifts on our graves rice and apples, toys and books and slices of cake on the second day 100,000 cherry trees were planted on the border that our divisions […]
Interior, Vincent Terrace
after Frank Auerbach’s ‘Interior Vincent Terrace’ Let’s start with a piece of furniture – say a table or chair or bed – add some figures have them doing something – making love, quarrelling, misconducting themselves – have me enter with the desire to hang myself like a lantern from your ceiling in the warm wet […]
Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales
after Hendrick van Anthonissen’s painting ‘View of Scheveningen Sands’ for Sionna we stood on the shore for a century at least, waiting for something to happen. when paint dries it leaves a ghost of the liquid sea; time exists as space; we watch the enormity of your absence. the past goes extinct. it’s like being […]
Miss Clara, Rhinoceros in Venice
after Pietro Longhi The fifth specimen, I believe, since the time of Rome she is an old and nicely padded lady with her skin all ruched and drooping Poverina, ten years paraded before Empress and Elector in the sad company of two dwarves and a crocodile until she ends up here, sans corno to be […]
Ash Flower
after Anselm Keifer the dead, who are thinner than gas might fit comfortably in their millions in a simple cardboard box so why this desolate hangar – ankle-deep in guano and plaster-dust, quiet as a sick forest was Buchenwald once really a forest – trees acid-stripped and skeletal grow down out of a broken pane […]
Mollusc
after Sigmar Polke’s painting ‘The Illusionist’ Her bedroom became her father’s darkroom. Here he made magic, turned negative positive, called her his special assistant. Closely he focused on his assistant, taught her how to work the developer, stop-bath, fixer, too, left her with prints of the family history. Downstairs with arms crossed sat her mother, […]
Unliving
after Callum Innes’s exposed painting ‘Green Lake’ It is enough to paint a square of black, so black it swallows light, black as a trap-door to the past, black as basalt. Next to it, another black square. Unpaint it with a brush dipped in turpentine, unpaint until the green inside black appears. Focus on black […]
Seascape, 1952
after L.S. Lowry’s painting ‘Seascape’ This scene is teeming with next-to-nothing: sky only just distinguishable from the sea, the sea a hair’s breadth from being beach; I have the feeling that any minute now a single gull will appear, or a pebble will emerge from the only-just sand; that not too long ago, something vanished […]
Cartoon
after Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawing ‘The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist’, kept in the dark room at the National Gallery This love is kept in the dark. You only visit it, through curtain Of hush and black, you step Into a different colour of time. There is no eye […]
Bride of a Beast
after Odd Nerdrum’s painting ‘Running Bride’ Bride of a beast, silent, tyrant woman caged out of her own poem. I’ve been cradling a wet rag to his feet when I could be dressed in nothing but a summer mist. Where is that girl gutting a bear to wear its hide as a bride, chopping fur […]
the lake is enough to blind you
after Bob Ross’s painting ‘Winter Mountain Lake’ It is an old story. Girls, perched on banks, shedding masks onto the moonlit pebbles. They are giggling, brushing white flecks off their noses. The myth tells them to drag fingers into the lake, lick the ripple, splash dirty off their mishaven legs. Mother warned of wolves nuzzling […]
hangul abecedarian
after Franny Choi and Jeff Koons’s Gazing Ball Series get up—as in the world goes on, as in you cannot not spin until you collapse into the couch next to you. do you know why you can move in a moving world? listen. you don’t hear the gentle whir of an axis, mounted on a […]
Pink Dress Pastoral
after Andrew Wyeth’s painting ‘Christina’s World’ 1 When there was such a thing as country I stood in a tobacco field and felt I was drowning 2 Now I can buy a muslin pink prairie dress online. If I don’t have enough money the website says I could cut my hair with an electric razor […]
Acquainting an Orange
after Edward E. Simmons’s painting ‘Old Woman Peeling an Orange’ The art of peeling an orange gets harder each passing season. Still, her thumbnail presses under the rind like it’s an envelope, a love note from long-gone seasons, ones where the shadows bleed out at noon, and the rain is delicate as a chandelier. It […]
Shibboleth
after Doris Salcedo’s photograph ‘Shibboleth I’ Tell me, do I pass this test? All day I have studied the ways things break apart – the shapes of the spaces they leave behind. It is not unusual, to want to know how two halves of a peach pull away from pit, how scalpels propagate brief stories […]
Body in Exile
after Mira Dancy’s painting ‘Blue Exile’ Mid March I give up my lungs. Here are the seedy airways that have shrunk in my chest; here is a bruised […]
I asked them to look at the sea, as long as they wanted
after Sophie Calle’s ‘Voir La Mer’ to know the sea is to know obliteration— foreground and background coherent in a vista of absolutes. it is the latticed distance between a human body and infinity, forbidden texture of low desire, the sole existent way of approaching the earth from behind. it’s here, stranger. before you. your […]
120 Bricks
After Carl Andre’s sculpture “Equivalent VIII” sculpture, made up of 120 fire bricks I will lie down like bricks offering you the rectangle of my body: spare sparse angular like the wall you build each time I approach
The Nineties
This is our fear of ‘the other’ – Indians, blacks, Mexicans, Communists, Muslims, whatever – America has to have its monsters, so we can zone them, segregate them, if possible, shoot them. – Robin Robertson, from The Long Take i. April 29, 1992 This is not your city. What burns and whose likeness with […]
Inheritors
The speakers are all liars, sweating red sunset, orange sunrise vibrates the TV at dinner, the conversation doesn’t start again, in the static silence a crackling of throats, after twenty-five years the clock halts, clattered forks, hands well-washed, plastered over, hollow words richochet off walls, snarling family, poster smile, “theresalwaysgoodinbad”, the rattling cars at five, […]
Paris
All I think about is love and money, marrying for money and falling in love on the side. Staying in love with my old loves, meeting them in oyster bars, never forgetting anything, never making any money. I think about Jean Rhys in Paris, waiting for Harrison Ford to wire her some money, she was […]
About me
My Hinge bio says travel photographer / amateur barista / debut forthcoming from a publisher you haven’t heard of / anticapitalist pop-up shop founder / found my latest calling / when my Hollywood career stalled / sordid story / identity theft / I try not to talk about that these days faked my own death […]
Everything you’ve always wanted
I was outside the Salvation Army building licking the cream from the rim of my hot chocolate when a man appeared beside me and said, You’ve won! Won what? I said, wiping my moustache with a finger to make sure I didn’t have cream on my face. Everything! he said, You’ve won it all! He […]
Novelty Race
Three-legged, most kids rollick along, like good-natured argument. Naturally, the twins get it right and stride off in time like a well-made dovetail joint, a catamaran, or scull. They pulse out in front, pulse to the Finish line – laugh as they double or halve their one sporting moment in […]
Making History
In all my years of sewing embroidery in Kent, I never believed in chance, so I took great care to get the bones of this story to be tapestried, so was obliged to hear several men’s witness. I am also used to tapestries being their proper size and shape, so when Bishop Odo lessoned us […]
The puzzle room
The waterfall is complex: white foam spilling over black rock, two centimetres wide. Marion slams each piece into its rural setting and rebuilds the cottage with no roof. I try to distract her with a map of the world, tracing routes and jig-sawn borders. She sings Angola, Namibia and South Sudan, her fingers landing on […]
A convocation of pylons considers how to celebrate country-wide conversion to renewable energy
Were they to dance – the girdered piecemeal sky would limber up, cables would be swung for skipping ropes, there would be sparks – fierce fire in stuttered arcs, in zig-zag strike on latticed steel, zinged buzz of seared scar, they would be clad – skeletal frames in kirtled folds […]
Letter from the Foothills
for H.M. She writes: time is passing very fast here. You go to the pet store, buy a kitten, take it home, clean its suppurating eyes with a Q-tip – don’t tremble! It starts purring, very loudly, then it’s a ball of dust. And the waterfalls! The majestic waterfalls! Each of them seems to be […]
hotboxing
Poem Beginning with Lines from Ye Hongxiang*
I’ve leaned towards the edge of the sky along the curved railings; where the sun falls aslant on the gaunt green hills… How will I survive the moonrise for one more evening, or the sound of dew dripping from my leaking parasol when it would be so much easier to die and die and keep […]
Red Hoover
He was ridiculously good-looking. He was even Nigerian − though Mum flits between this being a good thing in people and the worst. I pulled his photo up on the internet, showed her. She decided, on the spot, his Nigerianness was a good thing. It was easy to pull his photo up on the internet […]
Sunset
I turned the corner and spied a nice shell. I clamped onto the arm, pulled out the body and crawled in. I heard the sea inside. I crawled along the beach. It was light and the shell was cracked. I went under a rock. I went under a rock. I went under a rock. I […]
Sunrise
I turned the corner and spied a nice car. I opened the door, pulled out the driver and got in. I played music on the radio. I drove along the road. It was dark and the lights were broken. I screamed around the corner and knocked another car into a lamppost. I swapped vehicle for […]
M
you waded through my dreams again last night drew yourself along the current of the partitioned streets I had shuffled down in my youth beside a girl a few days older than me and bargained for my time said that you had swept along our earlier days the chiselled jaw line hook and sinker the […]
Letters
We cram our lives into tight spaces, love dried and pressed beneath all the books you’ve ever lent me. My postcard heart flutters as I tie and untie knots to your quivering breath. Origami sweet wrappers, the closest thing to skin, stamps like fingertips. Here, let me give you my kneecaps, pin them up on […]
Suburbia in Isolation
Around the corner from Rock Rd to South Maple I’m watching a drive-thru birthday, cars in procession, squared-off in gift paper, a great parade. I string along, dragging my dog to the fence, yipping, yanking, to give her a little privacy—our local drugstore is taping an X underneath my feet so I back up only […]