I had thought that I preferred its placid waters that trade a Lethe forgetfulness for our reflections in soft focus, encourage a belief in the metaphysical, a fantasy of fish dancing beneath sun-speckled mirrorballs to the Gauloises wheeze of an accordion; but when they drained the St Martin Canal, what they found, along with the […]
Poems
The second lie
Start by telling them about that night I was lost, adrift, a skinny ghost tripping through Shinjuku’s dirty streets, hob-nobbing with yakuza, dizzy on shochu, face shiny in the city’s thick wet heat. Or that morning my legs dangled free from the helicopter door, Vietnam’s canopy flattening like moss beneath my feet; cold hands toying […]
On reading Professor McGrath
‘We must be prepared to be surprised at those whom we meet in the kingdom of God.’* They made him smile at first, those hope-laced words which appear to dent predestination, intoxicant as gaudy hummingbirds in hovered flight. McGrath’s bold suggestion hints salvation might be for one and all, not the preserve of a self-selecting […]
Being Swedish in Pontlottyn Rugby Club
Word goes around: Maria’s friend is Swedish. Boys in stripy tops line up across the dance floor curious to know if my life is all sex and cigarettes. They tie themselves in knots to get close to me. I make space between my lips to let out the nonsense of pretend Swedish. I tell them […]
The Dub Artist
I’ve been learning about dub-engineers and the tricks they play: marrying up their own footsteps to the character’s gait; slamming the studio door at just the right moment; rustling leaves in synchronicity with the screen. They replace those little things lost beneath dialogue or tense music or laughter. Some things don’t sound like themselves, and […]
Sp/lit
Whitewash
Cyprien told me in confidence, and I promised his secret was safe. I remember the bar, the tarnished walls, the termites sucking the whitewash, their exuberant, tenacious persistence upturning the earth underneath. We were sucking Fanta through straws. He was the one neighbour I knew didn’t drink. He leaned forward to utter the words. I […]
Home County
There is a village coiled in the Chilterns, all catflaps and thatch, black beams and whitewash, cradled in hills and cosseted by trees where bellringers reel out handstroke and backstroke the way the red kites loop the sky while we walk the dog or jog round the park. But stay awhile and it’s not so […]
When Ursula Tyrwhitt was Gladstone’s Lover
Dear Gwen, Today’s vase holds mustard-yellow chrysanthemums, yesterday’s were rainbow-paper anemones. This evening we spoke about the economy, I hold our balance in orchid asymmetry. His hands, after a day deep in stately missions, turn our passion, the blue-deep of delphiniums. He scribes such love scenes I’m losing my faculties, his ink, tattooed on my […]
Appointments
Contains strong language. The first doctor insists that my relationship with food is to my self what a seed is to a fruit, that my eating habits are the moon and all my life’s catastrophes are the tide. The second doctor makes a diagnosis I can’t pronounce. My father tells me I will fuck up […]
Maple
They named me after a sweet tree As if to hide my spirit They named me after a gentle tree As if to hide my strength They named me after a small tree As if I would not grow They named me after an old tree As if I was not young They named me […]
Phlegethon
When she’s sat in the dark I light myself like a candle Burn away the shadows Til she’s sitting in the sunshine The only problem with candles Is that in order to glow They must burn themselves away But when she’s sat in the dark I swear, It takes everything in me Not to set […]
The Drowning of Li Po
And Li Po also died drunk. He tried to embrace a moon In the Yellow River. – Ezra Pound, ‘Epitaphs’ the river is drunk; reeling, it tosses the sad poet’s prow to the white moon which bathes gently in the dark water of heaven. the moon, enraged by this sot’s trespass, casts his prow […]
I want to stand naked in the school hall
on the podium, mid assembly, so my presence will be so overbearing no one can look away. I want their eyes to burn into my skin, examine its ripples and folds and the scar that digs it up like a trench in Ypres. I’d watch a few hundred jaws slowly unhinge, drop down into a […]
Zeyde
eyns My grandfather sat at the foot of my bed At six years old, my tongue bumbled over my anglicized versions of the Yiddish that he tried to teach me He was six when he learned his second tongue and I can barely see the first now I fell asleep to it tsvey My grandmother […]
my mother, with eight chemo sessions to go
there’s a green chair that sits in my living room. i’m pretty sure that it stands taller and older than me; for years it’s housed the bodies of my family and friends and it still smells like the wet fur of our first dog. i’ve never felt more ashamed than when sitting on the chair […]
Clocks
our clocks forgot to go back this year or maybe their hands have become stubborn in old age, so we live an hour ahead now, flowers drooping before their petals fall plates dropping when the guests have not yet arrived when I sit on bridges and watch water sleep walk, the people on boats are […]
what are we before we are mothers
woman wants to loop herself like a spool of thread into the cupped arms of a mug woman wants to use up all her thoughts considering the brown heart of coffee woman wants a man with a beard and a dog to lift a mug to his winded lips and swallow her chapped laughter woman […]
Explaining Memes to Keats
“So you see,” I say slowly, “It’s a little engine of remembering, recalling, reverberating in the mind, like rhyme.” “So, it can never die?” he replies. I avert my eyes. “It will, with time.”
the opioid diaries
snooze hit snooze again wake up pull on some dirty clothes run to the bathroom prep a shot cold shower shrapnel digging into flesh later dry hair wringing out dregs of the banal then abyssopelagic ecstasy when i feel like that i often feel what i feel * inventory: 70 mg valium […]
Love Poem to Myself
after Jack Underwood your hair continues to surprise me in its texture after every single wash / like the shock of a photocopier lid realising the other side when it beams white light / I could listen to you listing your banned foods for days / and tell you bad jokes about music as the […]
You’re Not Black
I sit with them at lunch Fried chicken on my plate I eat with a knife and fork “You’re not black, if you don’t use your hands to eat” Yet I know that hands tied up the strange fruit on the trees in the south The fruit for the crows to pluck For the rain […]
Meritocracy
And you, you will be sat there surrounded by crackling, yellowed pages with a wad of fifties stuffed in your mouth. And me, I’ll be sat here all picturesque, swathed in marble carvings and oil paintings older than my childhood home. And I’ll silently seethe, let the blood bubble out of my tear ducts, let […]
A Word of Advice
Stop falling in love with people you could write poems about. Stop tripping over and drowning yourself in metaphors And obsessing over similes Like your silly white shirt is clouding your judgement. Resist those with whom you can be Radcliffian, Fall in love with no one in any way Byronic, Or those who may resemble, […]
Regarding Anne Sexton
About the cigarette hammered between your fingers. Does it nail you to the world? I imagine you never puff where inhalations are available, that you’re always running out of matches. The problem with this photo is, you’re doing that look like a thousand grainy poets before and after you. Eyes left. Like you have just […]
The Terminal 1 Smoking Lounge
Funny, how midlife crises start in smoking lounges. You look done (God’s sake, you’ve no make-up on) holding your forty-year lungs up, a flag of tar. And who’d think, with all the life and bustle outside, you’d flee into a glass coffin, willingly, for peace? But you’re met with an ashtray vaudeville as Rodrigo y […]
In Which a Middle-Aged Woman in Primark Jeans Denies Her Invisibility
to be read in a breathless rush Can that be me, mon dieu, c’est pas vrai, in the LBD (c’est le dernier cri) that I’ve always craved, grazing slim knees and oh! slim legs, oh yes this vitrine is loving me – is that a fascinator I spy, rakish angle, speckled veil trailing over one […]
The Whole Tooth
Of the various evolutionary explanations of the tooth, I side with fish scales. It is a short swim from a defensive attribute to an offensive one. The tooth is composed of hard, durable material. It is often our last enduring remnant. In this way the tooth of certain persons has become famous. Although it has, […]
To Sugarcoat the Truth
“Is it easier to be good or bad?” my son inquires as the snow falls outside & covers the chilled body in its bed of autumn leaves. As a father, I’ve tried not to sugarcoat the truth, even if it speaks of genocide, of disasters magnified by humans. So the snowdrift is […]
Tamponade
our hearts on a heavy chain fastened to a faithful rib – Vasko Popa Still and light she lies, all eight years of her, her lips stained blue, as though she’s feasted on summer berries. And when the pressure falls inside her lungs, it builds in the powered bellows breathing into her. And when you […]
Talking to my Therapist about Climate Anxiety
So we sit, as we do every Tuesday, in chairs that are somehow too deep, with the six feet of professional distance spread out on the rug before us. How was your week? Not great – I wring my hands – not great I am not working as hard as I could be and my […]
Like Father
started 2000, finished 2019 for W.C., who encouraged me to finish what I’d started My daddy was Irish and famous – “Well, sort of Irish and sort of famous,” he said – and told the truth. He loved and he was loved, and was a joker, and in his youth he’d passed the eleven-plus […]
Nocturne for a Moving Train
The trees I’ve glimpsed from the window of a night train were the saddest trees. They seemed about to speak, then – vanished like soldiers. The hostesses handed out starched linens for sleep. Passengers bent over small icons of sandwiches. In a tall glass, a spoon mixed sugar into coffee banging its silver face against […]
Group Portrait at the Stopover
The National (UAE) reported that the Philippines’ top export is “its people”. The Guardian (UK) reported that the Philippines provides the third highest number of National Health Service staff overall. take a walk / over the sharp stones / then come back – Pablo Neruda i. Elbow to elbow on waiting chairs. We rummage through […]
Contingency
If you dig a hole and get in it, what then? If you, say, flick a tree and holler, then what? If you reverse into an attitude of dotty surrender, all flags flying, the sky as blue as an unblown whistle, the children dancing, well what’s next […]
Sacred and Profane
This poet once told me, poetry is pure. You have to approach words with the fear of God the way you hold an ancient Torah scroll found in an archaeological dig. And underground, in the trenches of meaning, poets engrave letter by letter in a tablet like idol worshippers in the name of the holiest […]
St Lucy’s Day
for JH We are half way through the dark time. They know it in their roots, the winter trees: What am I working at, an old poet, sitting over the keys? Today, I caught a glimpse of my face in a photograph and made out pathos in the lines of my mouth […]
Cambridge 1949
Look, how she teeters in a tight skirt on high heels over the cobbled street, past Heffers’ gabled windows and knobbly glass, the music of wartime dance bands still inside her – what does she know of madrigals and choirs, my adolescent self, in her first term? She dreams of Soho clubs and Raymond Chandler. […]
Poyekhali! (Let’s Go!)
Vostok 1 is Yuri’s little lunchbox, his spacesuit a scrunched-up smidge of tinfoil. Lid on tight, he is a happy crumb of a human being tumbling about, so forward rolls look easy up here. Just outside, the giant cheese-moon is full and smiling, and has picked Yuri first for her team. […]
St Petersburg
A murder of crows, caw, caw, caw startle from the trees, a bad ilk the sky pale, blue, raw. A sad black and white score darkened rooms, faces pale as milk the closed mortuary door. The coffins lined with silk the empty square, down with the Tsar we carry our dead on catafalques, the […]
The River
We slide through the brown gut of a river in a sticks-and-bones boat, plugging gaps with hair, strips of her shirt, chewed leaf. Frilled stars line up like milk teeth. She reads them, tells me monkey and pig always clash. I say, no, I am like you. I tell her how we will both become […]
one man band (gagarin plays the saxophone)
gagarin plays the saxophone, and his sigh propels the moon up into the air, tumbling skywards. gagarin plays the electric guitar, and stars bounce between the frets: tiny atomic ricochets making waves. gagarin plays the drums, and each offbeat is a sonic boom, filling the black hole with snares and cymbals. gagarin plays the fool, […]
bohemia
engraved earth, snug against the coursing flow its pattern endures through shine and snow woven through the grassland, scarcely letting go serpentine, carving the land curved and creased like the palm of a hand whittling trees and roads and sand breathing, brimming with vitality and the lifeblood yet liberating itself with an unfettered flood from […]
Muse
I. Night clings to her like some beauty, dew to a petal; others near and draw away, allured by her melancholic magnetism. Her bitter breath frosts their pallid frames II. emerging from dawn, subtle as a silver cat leaping rooftops, slinking from the slumbering streets. A Tipsy tune coaxes distant memory from the cobbles, the […]
Today
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Nadia Lines I go to a museum today and say hello to the light living there – what is gone, and imagine what I can let live on. I read a book today to remember an experience that I cannot understand and cannot have, to dredge up poetry. I paint […]
Today
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Aldwin Li Today I will go to a museum. I will greet its colours, both light and dark – I will wish its past well; welcome my future. Today I will read a book and recall little things, life, the lives of men – and call them to me; craft […]
According to Google Translate
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Olivia Todd The inspiration to use Google Translate comes from my secondary school Spanish teacher Miss Qureshi, who always warned us against using it. Today I am going to go to a museum to go to work; greet those living things there, light and shine. To forget the past and […]
today
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Beth Bayliss today my task is to go to a museum; to meet the colours that call it home, to greet the lights and the shadows: to forget the past and to dream of the future. today my task is to read a book; to recall an everyday quality of […]
Today I’ll sit in the museum
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by William Snelling Today I’ll sit in the museum to greet the gold-fringed things, the ancient masks in lit-up glass, to leave behind these drab habits and salvage some new light. Today I’ll sit between the pages that speak the street din and its pale dreams. Then I’ll write a poem […]
danse des vivants
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Daniel Baksi i roll down piccadilly to see Franz Kline capturing a room with his alphabet of black and white – i breathe through the bodies and chiaroscuro of it. to mayfair library, where the woman at the counter recommends me Àgua Viva. the spine harbours a resin of blood […]
Today
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Isabella Jiang Today my work is found in the depths of a museum—to greet the shadows, the many suns & hues within: to sweep the past aside, as sooted hair, & let the fancies pierce to the fore. Today my work is to read a book—to turn […]
I Saw
A translation of ‘Այսօր’ (‘Aysor’) by Lola Koundakjian, tr. Ellora Sutton Today I will go to a museum and embrace all the colours in the walls, the genius, the chiaroscuro. Gorge on the long spectrum of yesterdays, grow fat with the impossible embryo of tomorrow. Today I will read a book, break bread with dust, […]
Today I am
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Maia Brown Today I am a gallery; my walls breathing colour, inviting ideas from the shadows into the visiting light of the present. Today I am a book, worlds recalled between my pages; lives exchanged and invigorated, crafting the everyday anew. Today I am a page of paper; paint teasing […]
Heading home, dusk
Heading home, dusk, in the park the homeless chew their apples. In the bright, big, empty bank lights flicker on the plastic Christmas tree. A dark window catches her image and she steps out of this tight frame. Who emerges? She stops. She always stops here, she wants to know. Perhaps now it will make […]
Two Photographs
In the older photograph my eyes are two frowning pockets, and my chest only housed knots and clauses. I used fast shutter speeds to capture photographs before sadness spilled into the frame. I was never one to track progress, but today I did. Before taking that selfie, I bent the sun toward my face and […]
Aspeciation
I am the first of a new genus. I say to the insulating skin. I say to the motor of the feet. I say to the dent in the femur. I say to the alloys of the alleles. I say to the polished gleam of the bicep. I say to the rusting of the curtseying […]
Bothered
I am very bothered when I remember all the terrible things I have heard. Especially when we are told the world is changing. If I am disgusted at the stories steeped in pain and left to brew in misery what do the victims feel? When their leggings/ skirts/ shorts are held under the weight of […]
More Than Organised Dust
All women are more than organised dust. During those silent hours, my mind sailed. Put faith in the ones you know you can trust. My desire to learn was seen as lust. Eve set the world spinning for us — God failed. All women are more than organised dust. In Newington Green, I did what […]
On the Skagerrak Sea, with child
“It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy & sorrow, should only be organised dust … sometimes, when the sea was calm, I was amused by disturbing young star fish which floated just below the surface.” – Mary Wollstonecraft In the waves […]
Bones
“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Bones bones bones, Hanging from my lips are bones. Seeing bones, feeling bones, Hips, ribs and hidden bones, A ribbed cage. I wrap tinsel […]
Origins
My reputation died with me, so what? Decay is a wonderful smith. Bury a body of flesh or work, its skeleton slips through the fervid rot, awaiting a curious eye. Take these bare bones, do you see? I was the first of our genus, the squat fish to your swallow; dragging myself to new ground, […]
To my baby
“It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Sweet girl, Don’t give too much, for people don’t always keep their promises, but love them anyway.
Biography
He seized the day and shook it as it passed. And so it passed and so he seized the night and as he shook it cried I seized the night! and so it passed. He took an ancient play and moved the pieces here and there until he’d made a play about a man […]
One vegan future (good/bad)
the poem doesn’t have to be interesting, certainly, but it can be, if you want it to be. There is always going to be a market for ‘interesting poems’ whereas the market for ‘not interesting poems’ is generally less dependable though it is characterised by sudden bursts of enthusiasm: disinterest is a far wilder and […]
from Notes from Utopia, Inc.
for my grandfather 1 Who minds the minders? To watch them watch you watch them watch each other watching you, as you walk along the Taedong River, down Revolution Avenue to the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, past the Monument to the Martyrs of the People’s Party, past the guard-towers and interrogation rooms, labyrinths of […]
For Such a Widely Used Material, Glass Sure Does Have Some Downsides
In the beginning it was cream and fucking peaches. In the middle it was like finding a simile so exact as to cease its working. Like finding an apple with another, smaller apple in the middle. In the early-middle it was like a bull in the chinashop of my lazy preconceptions, like a bull […]
The Butter Festival
You can have all the other sadnesses, the yellow leaf on the burnt path, the silverware hopelessly scratched, the evening news and the morning news, the funeral, the rotgut, the crappy tag sale, the dead fish seasoning the shore, the memorial, the wake, the Ono no Komachi poems, all of April 1998, the lunar new […]
Ramadan, 2019
We stalk the moon all month round, lick our lips, till the Adhan goes off on our phones, dig our teeth into the soft flesh of dates, wash it down with Roohafza, rinse and repeat. The scholars paste their eyes to the sky, the crowds trade their eyeballs for telescopes, watch the moon turn bashful, […]
For Exile, or Chang’e Speaks from the Moon
Here, I am closer to the gaps in the sky where nine suns fell. I can touch the trails left by my husband’s arrows, where the night was almost unseamed. And Mother, I can look down at the clouds that drag like the hem of your dress. I can see the valley where you taught […]
Christmas Moon
The moon looking down at the carol singers. The moon looking down at carrots for the reindeer, wishing he could eat them.
Moon Watching
I’m in my bedroom staring at the moon, wondering if I could ever visit him. From here, it looks like the moon is dancing in the light, as my shadow creeps across it.
lunacy
laying in a bed of forget-me-nots and wild garlic all Ophelia all bone and froth, you know, the way they paint girls I saw a dolphin arc over the moon, that great voluptuous croak (I kid you not) and then I looked around and I was laying on the moon, and it […]
Wane
The Earth held tight to what it had been given; those clear skies, that startling life. It held me to be a woman, gravity-bound. Wife with no husband, mother to the stars. A goring crescent. Sharp slice of lithium consuming itself. I was Selene and Sina, stray Chang’e, a goddess dissolving on the night’s tongue […]
Abe no Nakamaro’s moon
old Mount Mikasa under the unchanging glow waited, too – in vain nightly rose the cry: two shipwrecks and a war away lies my native land but the rabbit, hunched, pounding eternal rice cakes lends no ears to sorrow and so the poet immortalised by his longing lays his brush to rest.
“Oh you know how it is, women and their little phases…”
Still they say I am moon full, swollen with light and spilling over floorboards. Rippling with tides, roaring with dreams, ready to consume and ready to release, bleached white bones flung to a bleached white beach. Still they say I am moon stung, hymning […]
The Moon as Different Types of Food
What about Cheerios, awash in the milk of the night or the chalk dust of toast – imagine the stars swiped from the sky by a napkin. A cereal bar, with rivers of yogurt and chocolate aliens of dried apple – I am decorated with wrappers like aeronautical debris. My granddad told me the moon […]
Flèche
History At the age of thirteen, I wielded a blade because I had a firm grip, I was in love with Shakespeare, and the school team needed an épéeist. When my mother flew to Linz to watch me go 3–4 down against a former champion, she gripped the railing until her marriage ring was folded […]
Vanilla moon
Bedtime, it’s always that book about a man who climbs a very long ladder to draw down the white sliver when his daughter can’t sleep. The ceiling of dad’s spare room glows green with plastic stars, comets and crescents. An IKEA mobile strings a green planet, orange rings, yellow stars and a blue rocket. Too […]
Gibbous
Sometimes the Moon when newly risen sits as if a remnant in a bay, like it’s a wounded boat – or else balloon as it deflates; old soft crab-apple caught in the cleft of a bare tree. It sails out this evening sallow over Bungay, beyond the looming stretches where I drive through the dark, […]
Moonshine
The moon through chimney-curling smoke a milk balloon tied by tv aerial bars suspended in cold blue. Intermission birds encircle, play their winter games in dying light as clouds obscure the screen a deeper shade grisaille. Naked black-laced branches signal a watershed divide. Suddenly, silver Houdini transported to a higher sphere, illusion’s trick. A solitary […]
Moon house
We come from an empty room where we slept on cold air. There’s ice in the grass. Night is an envelope. There have been other moons: spills of orange, clear faces, crescents framed by windows, coins turned in pockets but oh! this deluge of light, vast slow invasion of the house – making a space […]
Written on this moon
The sun is pulled below the far-off hill and at my back the super blood wolf moon climbs slow to light the folds of moor on this eclipse, as snowdrops break from winter’s cold, life rises from the still-chilled earth but with the buds and shoots come grief when we are gone, imagine tarmac overgrown […]
Drawing Down the Moon (A Ritual)
Wash your hands in the blood of a million dandelion clocks, coat yourself in onion skin, the paper, the pearly layers make the congregation weep in longing. They don’t know why, just out of reach. Scud a puck of soap under your nails for protection. Line the windowsills with fertilised eggs and […]
Maundy Thursday
Right royally we’d screwed up, splashed out on non-essential starches and yeasts, spreed through a month’s wage one Wednesday night till emptied pockets hung loose and sad like donkeys’ ears. So we stooped low at the fountain of dreams, stole pounds and pence from tiled shallows, coins […]
My mother’s last mid-autumn festival in Saigon, 1977
A Golden Shovel after ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ by Ocean Vuong You light candles for every ghost of your blood, bend to say your prayers, burn joss to mask the smell of surrender. You pile plastic fruit at the shrine and queue for rations. Remember to say cảm ơn, even in the eye of […]
Morning After
A Golden Shovel after‘Party Piece’ by Brian Patten let’s forget it how we cut flares like night steamers the way we can clip and unclip each other’s bright wires worm our currents down to earth our […]
Brown girls’ anthem
A Golden Shovel after ‘Call Me by Your Name’ by André Aciman We die so many deaths before we turn twenty. We, the schoolyard Kardashians. We sew our stories, rip them out as the schoolbus pulls up at our door. We out cast our vile tongues so the aunties won’t. Scrape it so they won’t […]
Hilly City Ode
A Golden Shovel after ‘Fern Hill’ by Dylan Thomas Funny how the spring rain unscrews the time sending the clouds scattered ahead that had been held fixed like memory for months, nowhere for me to look; now branches drip overhead, fat and green droplets like crystal earrings glittering and singing on tarmac like there’s no […]
to bee, or not to bee
A Golden Shovel after Shakespeare the garden yawns: it has just struck two o’clock. small creatures crawl, summer-drunk and muffled by heat. in the dirt, a bee tumbles over and over itself, belly showing, legs whirling dust. i excavate, scooping up an ore made of hot earth and gravel and grass and animal, a hysterical […]
quoting baudelaire and living in the eighties
A Golden Shovel after Heathers christ, as soon as he turned seventeen he was swallowed up by it all. chaos coated him like a sugar glaze. dressing like the search results for ‘grunge’ on pinterest is popular with teen girls. apparently. a different one every Thursday. what lost me was the way he threw out […]
Time Traveller
A Golden Shovel after ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley They have built things, these wrists, my teeth and tongue, they howl my name I hear it in the downpour, the glass is rattled with it, a furious Ozymandias gale-force. I choke on the word king the wisteria forming my spinal cord isn’t of bending bowing […]
Bring
A Golden Shovel after ‘Days’ by Philip Larkin For me, pain brings, among other things, the tissues of the priest pressed into my palm, and the silence surrounding the suggestion of seeing a doctor.
Plot
(in Hills Cemetery) Seen it. The plot & like it. In all particulars. Rough grass soon to be mown. The handful of ants clambering up the harsh green stalks then down. £437. A snip. I’ll take it with its unseen complimentary worms. The only earth I’ll ever own around me wrapped tight.
High-speed Bird
At full tilt, air gleamed – and a window-struck kingfisher, snatched up, lay on my palm still beating faintly. Slowly, a tincture of whatever consciousness is infused its tremor, and ram beak wide as scissors all hurt loganberry inside, it crept over my knuckle and took my outstretched finger in its wire foot-rings. Cobalt wings, […]
Daphne
I could not run so I took root, still as a housewife, stagnant. My eyelids went first. Desiccated to tracing paper to sandpaper. You, in your gleaming arrogance, you could never foresee this; that my arms would age to bark, my belly an empty whisky barrel. The feet that failed me trickling in sunlight, toes […]
One for Sorrow
We blame our bad days on opening umbrellas indoors, magpies and broken mirrors, walking past black cats on pavement cracks under ladders, killing spiders, spilling salt on the table next to new shoes in a size 13. Cold calls from numbers ending in 666 – throwing pennies, picking clovers, blowing candles out, wishing for something […]
A private man, public spaces
Contains strong language A man will drown if held under by his own dead weight or a stranger’s hand, pushing him to the piss-slick tiles. There’s no safety in a closed door, but a man wouldn’t hope for more than he’s given – a body desperate for the air in another’s lungs – take his mouth, […]
Love is a Hairy Moth
Contains strong language. Love is a hairy moth: fickle and fleeting, Not the knight in shining armour I was promised, But a balding man who can’t stop eating, Just a turnip farmer shrouded in Wiltshire mist. Would it hurt to bring me roses rather than shallots? Or take me out to a fancy candle-lit dinner? […]
Mrs Mendeleev
What’s the point of oxygen if we can’t share it? What’s the point of Hydrogen, if I can’t watch the sun set with you? What’s the point of ionic bonding if it’s stronger than our love?
Pearl River
a tiger can dissolve into mist – the river cannot abide unscathed prey. you want to span the whole thing with looming towers, yet i too slip between sounds, iron dagger at my hip. that sparkling dust that refuses your fingers like scattered rice grains in a bowl. the dull clink of your machine-struck coin; […]