I want to tell you I believe I’ll survive this. That I haven’t been updating my will or receiving texts from the government as a ‘high risk person’. That dad isn’t a firefighter. That six of his colleagues haven’t contracted the C word and are off work. That he doesn’t lie in bed pre-empting my […]
Poems
Explaining Animal Crossing to my Nan
Look, see? It lets me hang out with Kevin in America and Lydon in China and Hayley in the next room. I can give them things – cherries, or campfires, or a lamp I made out of two giant clam shells and a lump of clay. This pastel pink koala is my best friend. She […]
Birds Bathing Under a Drainpipe
Content warning: sexual assault, violence for Naureen Bhat Elspeth edifies Edith’s wish; walks with her every door that smells of dead elks; questions the government; kisses raped women; questions the government; takes a shower; thinks of Emily’s emails; sends six texts – to say hello; say sorry; say the police beat two men because […]
shopping list as a sign of tenderness
candy mints kitchen knife singing hallelujah darling, if it’s between me & the sickness i will always choose the sickness bathroom mirror during golden hour black-eyed syringe a full visible spectrum of light summer divorcing my throat & sternum both, this blueshift -jawbone an old house piano keys in my head […]
On wheels
I had never ridden a bike in the city before now the wheels are the only shapes I can safely hold I use them to remind myself of the day of the month I stroll through the empty streets and notice what cannot be seen – salted tears, hands shaken, the figures with no face […]
Outline
There is a sharp sleek outline on the hallway wall, Pretending to be a metaphor. Graphite lines chase their way up the outline, Pausing and dipping for moments in time. Many have inhabited the metaphor, Many more will. The lines flow Up, and are broken at the top. There, the lines flatten themselves into Measurements, […]
Thus I became a heart-eater
I was holding myself like an open flame at Candlemas, when the doughnut presented itself: glossy red and obscene. The same vague heart-shape of a woman’s face. I ate it in three bites, in the street, thinking of Valentine’s Day, how every year it manages to hurt my feelings. How when I was young I […]
Translations in Survival
I became a boat, became closed scope, became static. Does the water not move, still, in waves? I became a road, became oil and bone, became static. Do the cherry blossoms not spill, still, like a watermelon cracked open with a mallet? I became a home, became soap and lye, became static. […]
Are Your Words Empty, Or Am I Hollow?
You needn’t worry Mother places her mantra in the palm Of my hand and presses reassurance. Then she lets go. Her words slip through my fingers like Water. And I can’t be wasting water. Temperatures surge to 25°C It is April and we’re burning. Run inside and switch the lights Out, plugs off, silence. They […]
Not All Warmth Consoles
to tread tenderly and still feel the whole earth creak and crave wilderness but leave tracks binding the terrain to fear the summer, the sweetness of fruit in decay and yet to see mushrooms flourish madly in spite of you to let every grief make a garden of you and to bloom and bloom and […]
Wildfires burn across Australia as Edward Cullen takes his top off for the twentieth time
A thousand miles away a country burns as we decide it is time for a Twilight marathon silvery moon cold skin in my heart as Bella moves from Phoenix, Arizona making me see climate refugees even in my YA we cannot see the flames like bees we are asleep smoked out impervious to our home […]
Bees
The sun rises; there is no rain. I look out at this gazed upon world, And I am counting the bees again. Do spiders return to the window pane As they should after so many moons? The sun rises; there is no rain. I find no relief in the quiet old lane Where I would […]
Earth (you are here)
after morn1415’s YouTube video ‘Star Size Comparison 1 (HD)’ The Sun swallows Earth in 7.5 billion years and life is 3.5 billion years old, which – relatively speaking – means both myself and all life on Earth is at a quarter life crisis. Katy Perry was right: I feel like a plastic bag drifting through […]
You Call it Eco-Trauma
Wendell Berry called it the “Peace of Wild Things” but the milk boy called it the curdled edges of his skating pond and the priest in his red house called it this too shall pass, and the black geese called it a generational flailing, and my lover called it a summer storm but really it […]
Grace or Trial
after ‘Quiet People’ by Moniza Alvi His wife and I are peaceful people but that does not say it is rare. We swing thunderstorms between us, split budding fruit from budding branches, share lipsticks like domino masks. She is quietly excited, a great composer in full swell, full crescendo or blooming. We have our signs […]
Tides
after ‘Moon’ by David Constantine We defeated the sea. Heavy rain and gusts of wind brought widespread flooding, Lifted our palms to meet the droplets. In yours landed a quiet fever, shivering. It spoke of moonlight, Trees toppling, buildings damaged, rivers bursting their banks. “In your last night, we will replace the sun.” Keep talking, […]
Madame
after ‘Fingernails’ by Ruth Fainlight I often see an elderly woman in my Paris neighbourhood waltzing down the street to her own imagined music, flashing a slightly demented smile at everyone she passes. When she was really old, desensitised by age and time, she never cut her nails. Instead, she let them grow until they […]
(Just Not) Cricket at Les Névons
after ‘Youth at Les Névons’ by René Char (tr. Michael Worton) Buzzzzzzzzzzzz pause buzzzzzzzzzzzzzz In the fields by Les Névons the sea and the sound of the crickets are a conversation you are interrupting. In the fields by Les Névons encircling the grounds of the park a fast-moving sea and a thousand crickets are breaking […]
Planks
after ‘Scaffolding’ by Imtiaz Dharker A house if I were Like this shored up Ancient scaffolding with Bars for the threat of windows And damp doors of roof tins Take time then would you Face into my walk From move to room to room And find the space quiet I begin where? Would you be […]
Found
after ‘Missing’ by Moniza Alvi When I disappeared, It was pale, clean, grey, Like the first morning of January. Waking up to a new year with no name And no me and no you. Tried on a dozen lives, and realised none of them fit. Not orphan, child, wife, ex-wife, Nor astronaut. Tried to squeeze […]
Taken For Granted By Everyone
after ‘Lost Weekend’ by Helen Ivory You lost a whole piece of wheat from that husband. Toast became forever and then no toast at all, at about eight o’clock on frost, like something stopped. The sunscreen shone through the noise and the blade of the sun sang so loudly, it was impossible to sleep. On […]
Paradisiac Snow
after ‘Tyranny of the Spectrum’ by Elizabeth Garrett For scissor-shattered rainbows take ONE capsule in laughter THREE times a day for THREE days. It is a grey occasion to drink the rainbow. Ignore side effects and the seven certainties. Carefully read all of this bland, transparent leaflet before you start. Take this whiteness. The window’s […]
Interim Relief
I went to the judge and asked for interim relief. He said, “What job, what relief?” At Security they’d frisked us for pearl-handled lady pistols and stained Tupperware. At 10 a.m. I stood up to address the court. All I wanted was to dutifully inherit this small patch of useless land, its parched soil rarely […]
The Injection Lesson
What do we do when we’re done scooping rice? I wanted to ask what the procedure was, after we’re done with things. After the dishes what heaven? After the car is parked what casual thing other than boredom? All around you, the preparations are being made for the great event, each syringe is lain, each […]
The Panther
You remember the panther pacing from one end of the enclosure to the other, loose skin draped over her shoulder-blades, hip-bones raw, exposed, and the day-tripping crowds gathered first wondrous, then pitying, then helplessly traipsing away. It’s true there’s always a choice you say as you order another black coffee, your flamingo legs folded beneath […]
Last breath
Drawing the field-edge to a knot, scanning windward sweeps of scrub, eyegold splashed from ferric pools, she is the buffeted grass, a demon crow, a sudden curl of smoke tearing lungs of fieldmice their redcurrant hearts. Lost amongst paths of vanished towns desolate farms, rusting tractors, she wanders every breath of wind a question mark […]
Boy cat
with your human face and pointed ears drawn on by a child press up against the window to see if she’s inside; she sits cowering beneath the table or the chair. And you are there outside the door after a week, a month a year, waiting – hoping to relive your pleasure and her pain […]
Kittens
Slap of Start Rites on a warm pavement. Two streets away, ‘Greensleeves’ on a tinny loop. Hand-smocked cotton dresses and a summer that slid through our fingers like a satin hair ribbon. Butterflies in the old quarry, the perfumed blackberry pathways that scratched and snagged bare legs, twisting down to the flooded pit. Pass me […]
Cat voice
I sound the spaces you have made black blip that shoots from no where now here across your scope and so you throw noise off […]
Artless
I fill my nostrils with her warm fur exhale family wish I did not fret about language its stresses, tense and pattern that writing could be like her stretch on waking – rump raised, chest dipped, one paw tendered – […]
Visit to the Monastery in Greece
We stayed ages in the church where Mummy lit a candle and stared at it. I did my best to be a good boy like she asked. I tried not to look at thorny Jesus on the wall. Jesus in my Sunday school suffers the little children. He doesn’t look like this but Mummy says he […]
Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy
has left me feeling vaguely sick and I think a walk is probably the answer, is often said to be the answer, though I now understand physical intervention must not be undertaken lightly and the appropriate training must be given because the policy is designed to prevent the impairment of health or development even […]
Letter from Kermanshah
If you do not feed yourself, your hunger will eat you; remember to attend and your food will make itself so that you can stand back and watch how it wishes to make you. There is nothing that cannot be cured with cardamom. It will listen to the way you imagine and it will taste […]
Middle Name with Diacritics
Linh hồn [soul] 1. A voice / tapping / from inside the skin 2. Quan Âm / the goddess of compassion / at the end of her ninth life / having shed the last stinging layer / of flesh 3. A temple full / of starving yellow birds 4. Ancestors / who stitch your […]
Reset
She chafes a flame from the lighter, listens to its gush of butane. This thirteen-year-old, hunkered down behind the PE hut. For a full minute she watches the raw egg-white heat quiver round its yolk. Then she unthumbs and the flame slims out. She tugs back her sleeve on a scar, a small pink socket […]
Kindness
Instead of you dying, why don’t we go for that walk, in the woods I couldn’t find in spite of your neat, hand-written directions. You’ll pick me up, I’ll climb into your car, you’ll say Sorry it’s a mess, although it will be clean. When we arrive, I’ll say It’s so pretty here, and we’ll […]
Due to a series of ill judgements on my part
my son lies asleep in a tin sandwich box inside the knapsack of a man deep within the Cayuga salt mine’s corridor of teeth where there’s the sound of what in my son’s dreams he takes to be our neighbour’s cough but means, in fact, they’re blasting new seams in the caverns beneath the man […]
Where Dedushka Comes From
From the bird’s head of Azerbaijan to feathered Caucasian mountains. From October 1917. From the years that followed. From the oil fields your father owned. From those fields he lost. From desert and steppe. From the place where fire jumps out of rocks. From a country which has not been a country for a very […]
MOONDADDY
Today the doctor asked if I was planning on keeping it Right now it is a little grainy moon distorted by dark waves that I know with the slightest change of tide might pull us closer together Being in love is like drowning in space oh baby you gaslight […]
Granddaughter Moves In
The grandma’s purple leg is full of flesh- eating-maggot holes. Each morning she hammers her hip into gear, limps past the old gas furnace and makes breakfast. After the dishes are tidied away, she sits on her chair and chains her leg to it. All day long she looks out the window while her cuttings […]
The fear will make the meat grow closer don’t be scared
can’t stop thinking – of all the things we didn’t ask for – bad ankles the beige carpets we’re given in rented rooms – brooms knocking against the floor from below – the downstairs neighbour who hates me – and by downstairs neighbour I mean […]
How It Started
When she asked, in her less matriarchal voice, whether I had spoken to you lately, I responded with a gentle no, wondering why. She mentioned Uncle D had spotted Big Mummy in the hospital. Her tiny frame wrapped from the brisk wind outside, wearing her bold yet formal bifocal glasses. Uncle D saw her in […]
from Bad Moon
they told us to watch for omens signs in the sky flashes of sick & warning light as if anyone could read symbols distant explosions they told us when it happens whatever someone will know reading the clouds i know i am far too late for low & sultry dawn i want your animal breath […]
Hotel Grief
Inside was like a tunnel – a long one at that – the whole stretch of summer advanced it. We were caught in its shadows while outside the sun blazed, Mediterranean. A vacation nonetheless, this is where we wanted to be. Nowhere else existed. We made the hospital our villa, languished in the day […]
Moon
I want the sun to spit at me like hot oil but there she sits clot of cream bleached orange full and sweet and selfish. She won’t wane […]
Deaf
She turns away, her lips untranslatable. arga et ay effan i reg nan a arr t ts a oi Margaret says Bethany is pregnant […]
An Acre of Grief
after Elizabeth Garrett oh how good i am at leaving the lights on at watching the flies buzz around a dead thing how quiet i must be to let him stay hidden in the garden like this […]
Cov City Centre, 5 AM
Magdalene Mothers
this is where the fallen women sleep. concrete floor for the too fair too pregnant too violated. be fruitful but not with them and not yet. in the image of god, girls, says the priest with the wandering gaze to nuns who nod like sheep to the children who were only half here anyway. who […]
Fill the Gaps
appointment
this is not a séance my hands aren’t touching any hard surface I sleep in a closed red flower same as my mother she planted a rose a few weeks before this whole thing is like what they say about plastic bottles you know each time […]
Things I should have done in person, that I did over the phone instead
Autumn, 2019
A girl becomes a boy becomes Tiresias blind to it all, […]
ill fate
the seven suffocated one by one i saw it in the paper their faces washed in black and white we sat around the well-scrubbed table thanking gods you were in bed that day illness synchronised with fate as if you’d read the future in coal dust gloved hands found prophesy in Yorkshire […]
Epithalamion
The beautiful geometry the trees become each winter here is beginning to blur at the edges and the robin we think must be a little deranged has for the third time in as many years returned from wherever she goes for sun and […]
Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
because it is hidden, secret (geheim), & all traces of it impenetrable, distant, like sirens blissfully sounding in the dark, what enters so assiduously broken is also what ends – the enforced meaning (Stop! Police! – how it enters the fray) after all no […]
The Poem in the Locket
After ‘The Photo in the Locket (For Louise)’ by Jackie Kay i There are things I don’t tell her private things, words eaten in sleeping bookshelves, a waitress watering plastic flowers. My new friends speak fast write less often; they come over and strip the sheets, leave the house bare. We smile and eat alone […]
Predatory
Don’t mistake this for seduction. When I make bedroom eyes at the mirror, I am only trying to see what the hare’s pupil looks like, widening like the handspan of the universe, only one arterial spray away from the wolf’s blushing jaws. I intend to prepare myself for violence. Originally, I wanted to discover a […]
When the writer visited
Again a memorial hour is near – Anna Akhmatova When the writer visited, blown through my door like a newspaper we drank champagne until white night slipped into morning while the Fontanka watched us like a fisheye, dead and gleaming, and the tree leaned in and tapped at the window. He left, leaving a glove […]
I fall in love about seven times a day
if falling in love means wanting to leave a part of yourself inside another like a memento for them to look back on once we have moved on to the next for them to cherish the way I have cherished them in that small moment of my life now a distant memory at the forefront […]
The Unofficial Financial Topography of Columbia, South Carolina
after Clare Pollard From the steps of the granite-plated State House, Columbia stretches its arms for miles, lazy & languid: to the midcentury sanatorium with windows pockmarked from stray baseballs, to the downtown strip advertising very quick cash!! breakfast sandwiches served all day!! to the three rivers at the heart of Columbia with better deals […]
Etcetera
Whenever you started a list, you always ended it with etcetera, the full word each time, between your teeth. I fell, hard, wanting to know the end of the list. I wanted to swarm with description. Who was I but the port to your starboard? I wanted to eat each strawberry whole. I wanted to […]
Wedding The Hand That Harms Me
after Selima Hill Ciara tells me I have to be selfish. So I say, the blood isn’t mine but I want it to be. So I say, he licked the butter from my fingers but I wanted something worse. Alanis Morissette sings to me in my dream. I tell her I cut the tongue from […]
(newborn)
after Clare Pollard She rises out of me like the sun, my daughter, casting everything raw. I sip cochineal soup, chew the New York Times bestseller bought by a friend who doesn’t know I’ve read it twice. A papercut c-sections my thumb. The Guardian thrums with a new Atlantis. She brays, my calf, her pink […]
Fragments of my mother’s homeland underwater
Southern Vietnam will be submerged by 2050. – Saigoneer, Oct 2019 Every place has a name for this. Here, it is tận thế. A fortune once told me that rain is worth everything and so I knew that it held all we had ever burned – pork skewers, begging letters, hell money, my great-grandmother’s remains, […]
Alipore Zoo
Always the big cat enclosure first, their moans swelling the bell curves of our brags. Tigers – drugged of course – stretched out on rocks across a moat: meagre Lakshman rekha for the two drunks with garlands, short work. The pong of spoonbills, whisked by scamper. A cockatoo on the mesh wiring climbing beak-and-claw. Between […]
January
I have begun the purge. Month of hunger, raindrops fall from window sills, ice slithers in puddles, the smoky breath of animals greets the air. Morning’s back already broken, veins obvious on everything. Emptying myself of all things ripe and wanton, I am winter grass. Observe me survive as earth’s shoulder blades that jut, cut […]
birdknacks
birds have got these world-counteracting smart-alec knacks: techno-turbojet shoulders and hup… they alone got plucked off lesbos on the salty sea breeze, while the wingless and flightless were powerless, even to get a mention in the press. feeling guilty about my rightful guiltlessness, i ate nonetheless and drank, played scrabble, slept in. lesbos under a […]
Seams
In time all cities blur and connect as each street remembers another, remembers the downward pressure on your temple as the plane rises, rises, as the lights of one city are gurgled by fog, and what’s left is one more night between time zones. What glow here. What unbreakable seams. You know the earth, like […]
On Form
Standing at pump four of the garage in Ballydehob filling the Honda with diesel, I want the counter to stop at a round number, a whole euro, so if the tank’s getting full and the flow’s clicking off I restart, easing out my finger then tightening the trigger until the digit ticks to zero. I […]
Ice Baby
When I hear what is happening in America I turn back on myself, crouch on the landing where no light falls and wait for the piglet in her sniffle to unlung. Like I know the full farmyard of her discontents and which corn snack to invoke against rainfall, I know no bailiff is coming to […]
Stone Tape Theory
Whosoever has pushed a tear of bread into a glossy pool of gravy has entered history paying the ticket price, playing statues as they lift to their mouths a fine brine of self, striking the figures of those minor gods who light the mineral tapes of creek and cliff: the shirtless walker raising his palm […]
Berlin Zoo
None of the animals knew why they were in the Zoo. None of them knew why the Jewish people stopped visiting in 1938. They were very ignorant and couldn’t read the signs all around them. None of the animals liked the sound of the air-raid warnings and in any case could not take cover. All […]
Pornography for Pandas
Yang Guang (meaning Sunshine) raises himself on hind legs, reaches for the carrot, a little higher building muscle for the two-minute act to come, his enclosure dim-lit, smooth-jazz dreamy, daubed with the urine of Tian Tian (meaning Sweetie) when last in season – all to get him in the mood, his bodyweight in food each […]
Animal House
A dolphin back-flips in the bathtub, sardines circle in the sink, a boa’s curled around the shower rod, & a troupe of capuchin monkeys claim ownership over our medicine cabinet. Up & down the hall, cheetahs sprint, while a polar bear snacks on salmon in our fridge & penguins stake out the freezer. Our master […]
Lord Percy And His Acquaintances Make An Excursion To Watch The Lunatickes At Bethlem Royal Hospital In The Year Of Our Lord 1610
It’s all rather jolly here at Bedlam, watching the Lunatickes growl and groan and writhe and rattle their Chaines, especially with a drop of hard liquor in one’s Flask to keep out the chill and a Pomander against the mighty strong Stinke. Some of the fairer sex recoil a little – those with more tender […]
From Z to A
In Spanish, it goes tho-O. Every letter is said, so it’s tho as in think, with an unvoiced th, without the ink, and then the O, as in the O of O please can we go? It might be practised along with zorro by beginners. Zorro means fox and is pronounced exactly like tho-O, apart […]
The Howdah
She’s high up in the tower block, stranded in a cage of glass, but no nearer the sun, can’t feel its warmth on her back – just another missing visitor. She’s sitting at her kitchen table where she spends most afternoons. Today she fancies a chocolate cup-cake, the […]
In The Mix
A sky with no sun A whale as light as a ton A book with no words A tree with no birds A dog with no bone I can hear them moan A knife with no fork A house took a walk A plate with no napkin I see that happen A rubbish bin with […]
The Zumbiog
Once I met a Zumbiog, Right here, next to this tree, He pombled over with brog-brog-brog, And sat right next to me. I told him his nose was awfully long, But he said that it needed to be, In order to luffle the snats from a fong He needed his nose to see. I asked […]
Smug as a Bug
What a scrumbumbling bother, my day’s in disarray; that grumbugging Humbug just won’t go away! I went to post a letter, but he was buzzing in the box. I wanted watermelon, but he’d scared them from the shops. He even bumped my bum, boy was I surprised to find that little Humbug so greatly jeopardized. […]
Moving Out
He dusted the horizon with a flock of birds, Dragged a steam train across the hills and reef. He opened the stratosphere to let some fresh air in, The asthmatic sheep bleated sighs of relief. He switched off the sun and twisted it loose; It slipped out of his hand and leapt into the sea. […]
Ode to a Soup Dragon
What is the soup dragon thinking? This poem will show you the truth. His silver-spoon eyes stare unblinking, In a dream of regaining his youth. His scales are like glistening croutons in glittering oceans of silky green broth; On the surface are sizzling droplets that bubble and sputter, to flame into froth. When he breathes, […]
When the Jambler Heard a Sound
On the murkiest of nights by the boricow lagoon The Jambler wandered in the light of the moon. An ice-cold wind steadily blew And the booming thunder came crashing through. The water glistened as the moon shone down And reflected shimmering patterns all around. A spangly jangly norjay plant was floating in the air As […]
Socks on my Ears
My socks are on my ears to keep them from the cold. My feet wear cosy bobbly hats that I think look rather bold. My scarf sits neatly around my waist to keep my trousers down. I know I look a dandy when I strut into town. Heads turn and eyes alight upon my dashing […]
We Couldn’t Help Melting The Snow
There once was a Sunheaded carnival Lay, got tired of carnivals and ran away – couldn’t figure if it was the night or the day, or the balls missing targets in a blonging-sort way, but she simply decided she just couldn’t stay and the Ferris wheel saw her go. The Sunheaded Lay met a quizzical […]
The Gift
with thoughts and images dreamt up by London schoolchildren I walk through Winter’s city, my footsteps stain the snow. The darkness shuts like curtains. It’s later than I know. Dark is a heart that’s breaking, Dark is a dream you lose. Dark is a pounding headache that makes the world a maze and then a […]
In a New Light
O sisters too, how may we do / for to preserve this day This poor youngling for whom we sing / “Bye bye, lully, lullay”? – from The Coventry Carol, 14th Century. Lay down a blue thread of river and make here a city, weave a busy tapestry of trades and guilds and merchants. […]
From the Log Book
Wednesday 16 April, 1941 ‘5am: Report very bad night, everyone behaved splendidly’ This building, dressed in a collar of smoke, at whose feet only fog and ash flower, whose bricked heart hides Wellington’s monument, prepared for the inevitable blasts. Unsleeping structure, lit by the Thames’ glow, building of contradiction, vulnerable, and yet, still, imposing in […]
[Zeus] Anatomical Dolls
It’s hard to explain. Let me show you with the anatomical dolls. They have buttons for eyes and details under their pants you wouldn’t believe – look underneath at the girl’s folded labia, vagina, the tucked-in silk-and-string umbilical of a pull-down, poppet foetus, or the male’s miniature penis, his cotton-bag scrotum, his sphincter ringed in […]
Make Abstinence Great Again
Seventeen magazine – tell me; is he flirty or friendly? you must not condemn me; male decency is so alien. is it the chick-flicks? we’ve been pumped since kindergarten; if he pulls my hair – interested (rape culture is coded within our moms’ advice). is it the fan fiction consumption? or about the way we […]
Grief Counselling
After Caroline Bird Have you changed the way you write your soft letters, like m and c and s? Made them harsher, perhaps, to offer no hiding spaces? When you wake up, do you have to weed your eyelashes? At dinner do you see a thatch of hands writhing in the vomit of your lamb […]
Hound
WHAT IS YOUR NAME? My name was spat out of a laughing river. It is lips of salt, it is soaked in sunlight, it is without god. HOW OLD ARE YOU? I am old enough. You can count the tree-rings on my torso if you cut me in half. HOW IS YOUR HEART? I wish […]
allegiance
Based on questions from the civics portion of the naturalization test for United States citizenship. What is the supreme law of the land? ask me where I’m from // go on / ask me // don’t / be afraid // I’m harmless What does the Constitution do? ask me where I’m really from // go […]
How do you freeze time?
Is this something that humans can do? I guess you could drop your iPhone X but that wouldn’t give me more time with you. How do you freeze time? Is that something that we could achieve? You could always send a photo to the wrong person but maybe I’m just being naive. How do you […]
Best Left Unanswered
Why is there dissonance within music? Must a pianist’s chords clash and release, like tide shattering a hermit crab’s home? Why do trees fall? Are their roots too fine in holding their dignity of years? Or do our axes force gravity upon them? Must a story always end? Should pages be written in indelible ink […]
Whispers Carried By The 3AM Winds
Should I seal my singing lips so as to not wake others’ demons? Should I lock my rattling voice box and let all my unexpressed opinions choke me? Should I remain a ventriloquist’s puppet and speak others’ words? Should I hold my breath and stay under water, lest the free air liberates me? Should I […]
The other
do I remain when I leave for good, huddled in the corner of your brain, unwanted, chained, quick, quick lock her up get rid am I embraced do you have a synapse dedicated to my name that sparks heady glutamate when I am mentioned casually in conversation, do you […]
pssssssssssssst
pssssssssssssst. pssssst. hey i heard maybe you wanted to talk. no no its okay im not busy whats up man im sorry to hear it. you need space? wanting words? wanting poems that know what is up? how about even at night in the garden the birds fly. the stars are incapable of grief, and […]
To the reader (from a poet, with love)
Leave the poem where you found it. It was never yours, and besides, it has a dangerous song. Can you not hear the blade in that soft, serrated edge where you casually scrape your thumb? Listen to the way the light screams when it comes to rest on these bands of black and white. A […]