Here the county lies in an old skin shedding hops, apples, sweetened air blowing blossom and spores, the scents of earth turned from season to season. In the county archives maps unroll their old boundaries, parish by parish tithe by tithe, where orchards are named in hundreds for the conservator to explore inch by inch. […]
Poems
against a wolf at the door
Summer’s end you traipse Red Riding Hood style into the wood, off the path to be bloodied and purpled picking blackberries. Child of the Grandmothers Sugar Roll & Preserving Pan Collective. It is in your DNA to weave hand and arm through aggressive laces of briar. Your fingers pluck a season of weather encoded in […]
Trawlermen
“I had a white ‘un once: there were that many pockets I could never find my loose change.” Hull trawlerman Three weeks at sea then seventy-two hours for the ‘three-day millionaires’ to put on their suits (sewn to order by a Hessle Road tailor – a jacket in sky blue with belt or double-breasted […]
The Cake Mixture
After Edip Cansever a woman searching for emptiness of being creams butter and sugar in a mixing bowl one, two, three yolks and a tiny piece of shell she leaves the shell a moth enters the room she adds the coldness of milk and evening air echoes of mothers calling their children the darkness […]
Landfall at daybreak
Fetch a saucepan – the small even-handed one with a lip on either side, find the flat wooden stirrer, or better still, use the spurtle Granddad made, take the rolled oats from the cupboard – the nearest stout paper packet – marvel at the pale yellow elephant on the front, outlined in bright blue, look […]
A Traditional Cure
To hold her down, that mother’s tongue, you need an iron plate to stop her scolding – a man-made tongue rigid and silent in its strength. Language can be tamed and tongues be taught. All she can do is dribble now, around that held-firm tongue and utter baby sounds – no scolding words. Her head […]
In the Nude
While on holiday on a Greek island we stayed in a small village, and at the bottom of the road was a nudist resort. This was amusing to us but I think for most people it would have been embarrassing. Driving down past it on our way to the sea, some of us shut our […]
God in 80s Movies
This baby is born in pink mood lighting, synths shimmering as her tiny raw hands claw at the vinyl ceiling. This baby is born in a three storey house – powder blue and Victorian. This baby has Coca Cola and Chicago running through her veins. This baby cries prettily, and her screams fade out when […]
Elephantsong
“Do you think red is my colour?” I ask with softest teeth. “What?” She watches the mattress, how it languidly sinks beneath my thighs. “It’s just that that’s the whole Indian wedding motif; always red.” She wipes away dark chunks of kajal, small streaks of black smeared down beneath her […]
small print
if this product does not reach you in perfect condition, please return the packet and contents, stating when and where purchased. your statutory rights are not affected. well i’d like to return myself. mum will you pack me up in your stomach again. and tape shut the slit in your middle: the bit that opened […]
When my uncle stood at the top of the office block roof
he swayed from side to side, half-glugged bottle locked in his burning fingers, his silhouette framed by the black hole of night, flecks of scornful planets blinked behind his back. The whole world stretched out in front of him like the sides of a fallen-down box, and his eyes had been opened, and stared open […]
Nature’s diagnosis
i’m afraid to say i’ve swallowed an apple seed and now it’s growing its roots in my belly. i believe that the trunk will run straight up through me until i have a wooden spine and ribs of solid oak. i think the seed will grow, and make branches in my lungs till it pokes […]
The Beauty of Right Now
I grew up in a town decorated with honeysuckle and sunflowers. I was not born there, nor did I move there – I woke up one morning and the town came to me. The ground was paved with cobblestones, and majestic oak trees lined the main road (the road the travellers would walk with their […]
At the Funeral
Brother and sister take polar bears. Brother parks his between two F-150s but sister’s won’t stay, instead follows her to the front row of fold-out seats and licks her wrists when hungry, so she digs through her pockets for bits of raw seal. After the ceremony, she feeds brother’s bear too. Family members say nothing […]
Talking to my car
I once went over to talk to my dream car, and I complimented it, even when it was sleepy and still I climbed inside, and touched the steering wheel, snuggled down in the cosseting seat, told it about its engine, how big, how many this, how many that, I looked in my pocket and found […]
Of All Colours
Parading down the streets of Russia in silence, it’s 1993 and to be or not to be is whispered from balcony to balcony, corner shop to corner shop and the husky has chewed the newspaper. He’s ripped the headlines to shreds and the woman, in a multi-coloured bobble hat, she sits on a bench. Fingers […]
House with Missing Teeth
Imagine you are faceless and double-bodied, and your mother doesn’t look at you until the moon tinfoils you both, because you are only loved when in the dark and half-forgotten. This is a law of the universe, everything most beautiful when leaving. Your mother has taught you to love a body less body and more […]
Snakes and Ladders
There’s a house in America full of children Who like to play games Like Snakes and Ladders in their white Walled rooms. If they lose they act Up. But they’re children, what do you expect? Winning makes you feel powerful. Their parents are powerful People. They are expecting A work call right now, they can’t […]
Mr Sigiriya’s Weird and Wonderful Talents
My dad always told me Never to speak to strangers, So I always ended up Just speaking to my friends. I heard about him first from Tommy. We were walking home from school, Our backpacks heavy, Sweat dripping from our spring brows. “Mr Sigiriya can tie himself in knots you know!” I didn’t believe him. […]
Mrs Richards’ Year
The chairs – They were blue and curved and scratched your legs in the morning chill. But they were snug; A familiar, unchangeable presence, Despite the fact you would swap them like secrets. So really, it was a new chair every week. Then there was that odd sensation when you found your very first one […]
Recipe for a Towpath Garden
for SAFE Regeneration, Bootle Lift the old canoe from the canal, set down its keel on the dry grass. Fill it with soil and broken tiles heavy enough to thwart its restive spirit. Plant it bow to stern with medicinals: a small lemon tree grown from a pip, lollipop verbena, lavender, juniper and hops to […]
Lobster Shift
i want to mummify your flesh you’re ablaze beside my bag of bones so i can’t sleep you’re so still and i want to burn your gold wreathed limbs for slipping so swift into the dripping deep i want to kick in your soft brinks if you breathe so loud one more time lining your […]
Recipe for a Towpath Garden
for SAFE Regeneration, Bootle Lift the old canoe from the canal, set down its keel on the dry grass. Fill it with soil and broken tiles heavy enough to thwart its restive spirit. Plant it bow to stern with medicinals: a small lemon tree grown from a pip, lollipop verbena, lavender, juniper and hops to […]
Newly in love, distracted neuroscientists ♥
Polar Bear
A bear, formed from ice, darkens the window like drapes drawn on the outside. Out from buckled willow a mile further from polynya than it naturally hunts it stares, a furry doubting Thomas, into a translucent lounge as if this could be the place where seals are made. Melting sea ice confines the polar bear’s […]
On the conservation of mass
What in the world were they before, those specks of pollen smoking in the sunlight, shaken from lamb’s-tail catkins, seeking a home elsewhere and otherwise, as did his tipped ash wispy as silverpoint, rising and departing on the air? What becomes now of the boy he was, held all those years in the grainy lightprints […]
I am drinking yellow flowers
After ‘At the Quinte Hotel’ – Al Purdy daffodils forsythia marsh marigolds the mellow meadow vetchling last year’s dandelion wine yesterday I unfriended Facebook Twitter LinkedIn quit www.youtube.com cached the laptop […]
The Nature of Glass
What is a hand? A tender rake with which to claw your way out of sleep’s thick fleece, to crawl back from the landslip’s brink, to mark the track of your wracked body over the hot sand, so hot it could crack your heart and you still dreaming of the row of lives and loves […]
Collapsible deer
Collapsible deer. Sturdy beech. Nervy deer. Inscrutable beech. Dun deer. Dun beech. Warm deer. Cool beech. Portable deer. Pillar beech. Impelled deer. Impelled beech. Hoofed deer. Strong-rooted beech. Sweet-toothed deer. Sweet beech. Sugared deer. Sugared beech. Ring-ripping deer. Ring-ripped beech. Sturdy deer. Collapsible beech.
from Thomas Hobbes (1588–) Works Motherhood
1. Generation it takes a man to generate a man – Aristotle Hobbes considers the species reproducing itself through his cunt. He considers a horse chestnut tree in late April: lamblit green pushing against its own brown ability to reason – spineless pre-foliage anxious to make more of itself. He considers loins; jet-lagged adrenaline, their […]
During the Recent Thunder & Lightning
I There was the prandial-comfort of entertaining a few old cronies. The assurance, when the power went, each friend round the table was entertaining thoughts as infantile and forbidden as my own. One friend is convinced we’re players in a computer game. She and I argued the toss. Now happily I entertain the thought I […]
Self-Portrait without Stitches
after Tarfia Faizullah i was hurt i wasn’t i saw it on the internet licked yogurt from a spoon while the girls described their blood hot seizing the cotton of a sheet i am speaking from the cut place from my other mouths do not believe me for i was never cut or i was hurt but never sewn or i wasn’t i want -ed it i didn’t i screamed i […]
Three Qualities
“Three qualities make us adults: to give things their proper names, not to use another’s suffering like a baby uses that of its mother, third, to approach the end serenely.” You say the end and not death – that’s what people say when they’re halfway there – but I don’t want to end. The proper […]
In July
the days are long enough to travel three hours by train to walk with you from Top Lock to Bottom Lock: a descent of sixteen locks should give us time to talk. The noon sun is hot on the cobblestones, already, and I’m so happy to be here with you after all you’ve been through. […]
Forgotten Holst
I am Diana, moonstrider, goddess of the Hunt; The closest celestial body to Earth. I have gone by many names, Selene, Artemis, Chang’e… Wrapped in my triste grey cloak I dance to the sides of the main procession Sweeping my chariot in a lentando diminuendo to the dewy grass where I sleep forgotten in the […]
(Into)national Anthem
Ancient fourteen-bar meadow, please forgive how words mowed you down. How they murdered you plainchant margins of Queen Anne’s lace, your hushed lutes in hedges, in woods, and in fields that became guns, killing at a flag, learnt by rote, chanted back by cowerers afraid of death, bereft of life. To be pumped around our […]
ode to oud
sliced like a pear. pips pop between the strings and frets and slide like incensed sand into my hair. stone-walled and mortar-bared, black, dusty, spare, breeze-borne, like a rhythm running through a shadow, then ensnared. mouth closed, the breaths of agar trees remember the strip of bark and splay […]
Sea Interlude, Blackpool 1987
Every pylon we pass is the Tower and the Tower is a tram made of lightbulbs, the sea is shipping containers and the seafront is a slot machine sliding on 2ps. The pier is the glass giraffe we bought for grandma, the tide is going out between the floorboards, all the dogs are made of […]
Bwbachod’s lament
Mother told me I had to keep my virtue safe said it was something to be kept, a shut purse. I pictured it instead as cold liquid in cupped hands, such a small well of water dripping through my fingers. Mother warned me of thirsty boys, late-night girls who idled by streams, up to their […]
Grass Like His Mother
After Brahms’ Requiem Den alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras though not the brittle shiftings of a parched field, those stiff yellows scorched to desiccation, but the grass that leans, restive, into crosswinds and that beckons winter sun to touch it gold. Grass like his mother praying at her sickroom window, palms against the pane, […]
A Young Man’s Song
A young man should be faithful, keep company with chivalrous men – a jade brooch on his waist, his midnight-blue coat, emblazoned with kirin. In the morning, an audience with the King, then a ride to the village, Long Pleasure. He buys and drinks the most succulent wine, sitting among pretty flowers at sunset. The […]
Don’t
Day Forty-nine The warm buoyant breaths don’t miss you The winds that have left for reincarnation before you, that brush against the lips of your childhood don’t miss you The winter, the woman’s ice heart, dead from sickness, drifting away in the infinite blue sky with thin needles stuck all over it doesn’t miss you […]
Emerging from Matter
Psalms 22:14: ‘I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.’ I GIVE THANKS For the following, as listed: fragment of a god (unnamed); fragment of a frieze; a sketch of […]
how to catch a god
It’s all about desire, you have to get that, you have to find a way to push it into the stone – make it big because there’s so much of it and it keeps moving and flowing like the river. There’s his, to pull […]
soundwaves
i. swimming, eyes closed. i want to see how far i’ll get before my breath runs out and all i am is ripples. the sea feels impossibly shoreless, here in the middle where the waves twist my body into a question mark: can the ocean exist without us trying to cross it? ii. if water […]
[the space within]
Listen. Put on lightbreak like the loafers that don’t quite fit but will in time. Wipe the sands of shame and other people’s expectations from your eyes and waken into miracle. The audience has faded with the stars. Walk soundlessly through the forest that breathes and dreams with you. […]
listen to the middle voice.
i will take you now, let me have your hand (i heard there’s an artery straight to the heart from your wrist), let me hold it, and i will take you now. listen. shut your eyes, […]
Take a Deep Breath
(After ‘The Beast in the Space’ by W.S. Graham.) Keep to the edge! To be sure, the shore is your friend. Look at how she wends, sharp black forked tongue, up and over the horizon lines, lashing, thrashing, serpent, siren, tale as old as ink. Don’t turn the page! Her fossils are here, but overleaf […]
ECHO
I shall have the last word, snatch it as it loops to its full self, newt-like, belly oiled with vowels, only to flip it back; a thin ghost of itself, now tadpole, pond skater, to flit from lobe to drum, drown, as new sounds bubble from your lips. If I’m quick, I’ll catch a full […]
synesthetic translations
tur·quoise noun 1. pale wooden beads in your mouth. 2. tangling bracelet string around your tongue. french adjective eggy bread with raspberry jam. cap·tain noun 1. paper dissolving in your mouth – 2. fibres clamping your taste buds as though you spit ink. i·rrit·ate verb a mosquito laps orange juice from the crook of your […]
Romeo & her alphabet
I’m sorry. Romeo isn’t cooperating today. She’s sleeping. Listen to her drumming heart sighing up and down my sticky couch. Watch her twitching paws flying in the jalousie-filtered sun-lagoon of my living room. Here, tuna-shaped mice hide in wispy coral yarn. But alas, her dreams do nothing to close the Silence between us. Yes, I’ve […]
Untitled
In between the sprinklings of a summer sun let off for a new kind of yellow, an ocean of open vibrates within faces, closes and widens in tidal conversation, remembering and what are we? […]
Tangerines
Before the war was once-upon-a-time In 1947. I had to peer through cigarette smoke To see my parents in black and white, Lounging on zebra skins, while doormen Stood by doors in blue-grey uniforms. Nightclubs were darkened rooms, like mine, Where my parents stayed up so late It was light outside when Tony and Mike […]
A Dream of Langland
Mist over Malvern hills, a death cloud drowning in the sun, A shifting uncertain season, a truth tower toppling. Hob, harrowing his heart out, certain of nothing but hunger. A long lean man, a patched man, a godsboy dreamer, Shivering and babbling by a brook in winter, Anguish of injustice flowing from his frozen fingers, […]
In The Mortuary
Like soft cheeses they bulge sideways on marble slabs, helpless, waiting to be washed. Cotton wool clings in wisps to the orderly’s tongs, its creaking purpose done… He calls the woman, ‘Missus’, an abacus of perspiration on his brow despite the cold. And she is the usual woman – two terra cotta nipples like patches […]
das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilisation and Its Discontents)
Das Unbehagen sat with us at tables of cracked wood as we twisted palms of calloused leather soles years of labour in a plastic shine. “we are threatened with suffering…” It smiled at us as we sweated prayers into polyester sheets words and empty tins of beans a coupon-code G-d. “our body…” It watched us […]
new york, 1984
everything was a conflation of love and mortality, always had been, always has been how everyone lives, but we hadn’t expected it like this. […]
arrochar alps
my calves still ache from traversing that gorgeous, ballooning pregnant munro beinn narnain with her tufts of sheep opal curls slick from rain running from the threat of water breaking beneath that storm cruach nam miseag and we were all alone bitten and bruised vowing to never return to the […]
the civilised man
dips his spoon into a bowl of cornflakes but his heart isn’t in it. this is what society has done to us. he reads a newspaper about a war somewhere else, probably in the east. they don’t do that sort of thing here. here the war is internal. the newspaper says: he had become a […]
Blood clots in egg
a blur of walls and days then a jug, from the cupboard with its smears, splinter of shell with the sunny glob of orange and a search for debris amongst the jelly. forced to inspect, I find fragments of the freckled brittle, and then (mortified) gliding over the sphere of yolk – the guilty pink […]
Temper
There’s a girl over there With wonky teeth and a stare And she’s looking right at me, What does she want? The motley, Slack jaw open, intact, With one smack it would hang… But no, no– We mustn’t do that. There’s a kid in the stairwell, Ratty thing of just twelve, And by God, it […]
Civilisation
Daisies in her hair – barefoot and wilded Living on the edge of comfortable. I let her run across the open plain. But she cannot climb the trees Not when I’m not there. I have to watch her. I would like her to run and leap And graze her soft white knees On old bark […]
Inevitable
My friends and I, we are waiting for you to give in like the others before as there will come a time where there is no more of us who were crushed and burnt. Soon you will get tired and exhausted by the endless daily slog that will only contribute to the fog sinking in […]
Clast
When your mother dies there’s no one left to hold the sky. When I was small we lived on the top floor in Wimpole Street an attic window looking out on a forest canopy of silver tiles where an owl roosted in a revolving flue after […]
Rain Twice
i. Rain in a headtorch drifts sideways through the beam, slicks across a lemon moon and makes the woods a mystery of dog-scent, winter mulch. Pre-dawn, when Sharrow Vale and Psalter Lane lie down to weep proud as a grandmother and not your grandmother but mine – tears that never fall, caught by the landscape […]
Flame Eater
Padua, 1609 His shopping list on the back of a letter takes us back to a time when the world was motionless – the sun, in earth’s sphere, crabbed its latitude like a dog in skirts tottering on its hind legs. Fairies, decked out in mothy wings, flounce into the ring, reminding him Little Vincenzo […]
At Sanctuarul Urşilor
old friendships are respected: Attila is cohabiting with a wolf. Florentina waits for Boris by the perimeter fence, happy to crop grass under his blinded eye as he eviscerates oranges (his favourite fruit) or licks speciality ice cream made of supermarket throw-outs. Maria has been breaking hearts since she arrived – wears her blunt claws […]
The Present Is Constant Elegy
Those years when I was alive, I lived the era of the fast car. There were silhouettes in gold and royal blue, a half-light in tire marks across a field – Times when the hollyhocks spoke. There were weeds in a hopescape as in a painted backdrop there is also a face. And then I […]
Mercy Invincibility
We’re playing Super Mario. This level’s designed for one player and not two. The quick-collapsing platforms mean one always falls. But when he hits the spikes he starts to flash. The plumber turns invincible as a firewalker. A chance to extricate oneself. How often have our lives known that brief immunity – the crisis which […]
No Truce
This is the crystal ball that hides everything, but you toss in the equation. The cloud chamber’s walls will say something. The little goats draw near. I am as much a sphere as an angle, and I will give you no truce. Where is that rabbit that knows all by not knowing it? A serpent […]
Sound Machine
My mirth can laugh and talk, but cannot sing; My grief finds harmonies in everything – James Thomson And what comes out if it isn’t the wires dad welds to his homemade sound system which I accidently knock loose while he is recording Talk-Over dubs, killing the bass, flattening the mood and his muses […]
Spiritualist Church
I’ve never spoken to anyone of this – the Spiritualist church, its squat brick body, the mossy wall where snails congregate in worshipful hundreds on wet dusks. Every day that first winter, the winter I thought would bury us both, I walked past that church in sallow light carrying my son at my chest, my […]
Why I Won’t Run Away to Join the Circus
I don’t want a strong man’s thighs, a lizard woman’s skin; I’ve seen hardened jugglers’ eyes start crossing as they spin. I turn away when aerialists fly past at blinding speed; I’d rather knit for anarchists than see girls swing lock-kneed. I won’t join nine acrobats in a human pyramid; I’d sooner pickaxe ziggurats than […]
The Circus on St Kilda
We anchored in village bay, the sea swelling like a gale inside the big top. Our strong man was the first ashore, swimming out alone, a rope between his teeth, his head nibbled clean of hair, the circus mouse balanced on his back. The waves lifted him, dressed him in a coat of turquoise. He […]
Tight Rope
Rwanda, 2014 The tree trunk that bridged the road and his hut had weathered to fungus at tissue and heart yet he never replaced it. He, a master, could scale the length of it even in rain, machete in hand, held up like a feather, jerry-can balanced on a banana-leaf crown. When he’d been at […]
dicks like jesus
three days of vestry weather and the pinot hitting a stomach raw to produce a lilac mood where simply everyone is watching we the shaved en cas d’incendie – skimming death’s-heads and dropping blows through intercourse pearl-bordered & replete with sense of whimsy – imagination unseemly after four years coiled on his pillow in pear-cut […]
[Extracts from Love]
Dad’s Dick Floppy dog tongue Pig’s snout Chip-shop sausage on Saturday afternoons Lyric I of Sunday lunches Meat protagonist Centre of all narrative dénouement Never read a book never cooked yourself A meal Switch on the oven O organiser of the family unit Avid keeper of numbers You’re full to the brim with flinching To […]
Golowan
Penzance At night Penglaze roams the streets, clacking his bone jaws, nodding his white skull. Only a dead horse’s skull and a black cloak on a stick, but we believe, stay inside, barely part the curtains. Dawn brings Mazey Day with traffic barred from the town. Railings are a green spindrift of branches. Stalls compete […]
there is no such thing as a woman
if i say i am a woman will you take an ice-pick to my tongue & climb inside my mouth & sculpt the word in your image? if i cry out equality in my sleep the word too bright to see in daytime anymore will you ask me to sprinkle it onto […]
caryatid
my hands were soft until you tried to hold them. blue skies. no marble horizons. stone was not stone but skin. i knew how to bruise knew imperfection knew no grams/kilograms/tonnes or how to stand without making the ceiling sway. traced my own lifelines. my hands were soft under the sculptor’s tools. not clay, but […]
Instructions to the Three-Year Old Grandchild
Ayomide, yes, I speak to you. Never in your nimble mind ever stare into the hollow thing in the middle of another man’s eye when he calls you by anything other than your first name. Yes, I speak to you, In the cynical instance where the efforts, where the lights in the sky of our […]
ishah
“and he said, let her be burned” when her fingers wore the jewels of the kedeshah her face wore a veil; the man touched her but could not see beyond her eyes in which desert sands glittered for miles. there was enough in her veiled face to tell of that knowledge: how ripe fruit tastes […]
Fighting into the Night, for Light
Three children, a gas bill of £300, even with a heater permanently turned off – praying away the cold in the winter months – but I will always fight for the right to be myself, light to shine on me. Alone as I lounge in the tub, moss growing on the ceiling as I stare […]
Goodbye in America
I could not be a mother in America. I could not send my hypothetical little lad off with a face soft as butter, a camo backpack strapped to his sweet shoulders, and eyes that are mine without the shadows to school. I could not send my made-up boy to school in America. I could not […]
Choreography
We’d chase a beat-up sphere of synthetic leather across the parched dancefloor that claimed our days. Rising from the clutter of a sliding tackle, like we’d never fallen in our lives, we’d sprint into space so we could dance again. We knew when to bend our knees, pivot, hold our puffed chests poised, but best […]
Give Invisible
Kolo Touré is asked what he’d do if he were invisible for a day, he says “I’d rob a bank and give the money to poorer people.” There is so much we don’t understand about a man, we see everything and nothing at the same time like a page of writing written in a language […]
Balotelli
In between the lilt of your name and your skin like onyx. In between the matt curl of an afro and your flaming mohawk, between jollof rice and pani pizza. Between the dam of your tears and the wet chest of your shirt. In between why always me and leave me alone between the complicated […]
Lone Star
for George Weah Lone Star, you were a man on the run when you picked the ball up on the edge of your penalty box. A planet at your feet, San Siro stadium sealed tight so nothing escapes. The crowd a pair of eyes as you moved toward the light. One man in costume dancing […]
SAY
A brick-sized block of grey stone washed ashore on which was carved the word SAY. My dad picked it up at low tide and two months later found another, and another saying LES. We worked out that rather than a command – like Rilke’s flow – it was the name of an old firm, SAYLES, […]
The Stain on London’s Dress
She walks among us, silently shouting as chipped nails crawl across empty wrappers as Friday night’s quick treat turns into a sick craving for more and more until the breaking point leads to a moan of agony as we blatantly ignore the dark stain on London’s dress, scrubbing at the starving and skinny mark that […]
Yellow Stickers
Tonight I’m dreaming of your lips again, it’s saffron spring and I’m longing for love, specifically yours. In the kitchen Mama’s weeping chemical tears whilst chopping bitter onion ends. She’ll sauté them with mushrooms (so small you could swallow them like pills) we bought for 10p three days ago reduced to clear. Last […]
#EndHungerUK
She sits before an empty table, her eyes empty and sad. Will the food ever arrive? She’s waiting for her Dad. In the room next door a young girl cries. ‘I don’t want my greens! I just want to eat fries!’ She doesn’t have the energy to give her Dad a hug, He returned empty-handed, […]
Breadlines
Give us this day our daily bread So said the underfed, Give us it because the baby’s half-dead Because when Susie’s heading to the bank She doesn’t mean NatWest – There wouldn’t be any point anyway. They have cropped the Lord’s Prayer. They want one thing from the Divine: Daily bread, hence why When we […]
My Grandmother Tells Me About A Famine
it was july. no / june. there were no birds / no children, my hands / you wouldn’t know how to / boil bark & live. the deadness of mud, how the earth could spit you out / alone; & so / britain. we drive to the shops, my body that has never hungered, / […]
Concerning A Letter Written To My Local Council, Signed Your Conscience
i feel sickened as the plot thickens in the kitchen the broth of nothingness starts brimming and it feels like i’m sinning FIRST WORLD COUNTRY, YOU’RE LIVING so i daren’t complain, though i daresay i feel pain, though i feel half a man i look it and i feel it, my ribs don’t protrude like […]
Universal Basic Income
Workin who knows when, what uh way ta make uh livin. I drop Alfred at school, hear they too may stop givin. I take uh long walk down thuh High Road, handin out CVs like a hundred metre race. All distributed, I take uh lil trip ta Camden, ma fav’rite place. I’m there in two […]
A Closed Fist
I am hungry, But you feel no need to feed me. I ask you, ‘why?’ You quite simply give no reason. You would much faster feed a dying dog in the street Than acknowledge a fellow human in need. Or am I not human? Am I not human enough for you? Or are you not […]
The Miracle of Mould
You might think I’m more mould than mind, tampering with the gravitational pull between spinach and scale in the grocery store; a flat-packed scam folded into waste-paper skin. But swallowing so many honey-glazed lies I’ve simply learnt to nurse the glint of sun into gold; spin miracles from mangled bits of bread, minced excuses and […]
i pass the Nearly on my way to school
i pass the Nearly on my way to school, back pressed against the smooth of a huffing train carriage, slick. it looks at me from the tops of buildings, and snakes words on pages until my fingers suffocate and bleed. like a row of citrus-thorns, vinegar in sludge, it traces the waves of voice in […]
Missed
To the driver that nearly hit me the day the clouds pasted themselves over the super blue blood moon: I was always afraid of being you. Jumped into a snowbank just to save you from it. That day, someone had stolen the moon away. Robber-like, I had welded into shadows, made myself into silver; a […]