I was back pew sniggering at Walter Dishley’s sermon text – another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind. And in my pants a law unto itself was taking shape seeded by Linda Nixon’s cross-legged stocking tops. Aroused, the black suit crowed and waved the bible at ‘you back there, laughing […]
Members Poems
Egg time
Give me an egg as round as childhood. I’ll tap its innocent shell, push sideways through its Humpty Dumpty head to find a core of molten gold or the dry pollen of a hardened heart. May this teaspoon bring my tongue the taste of lunch hour on a school day when I’m six, hugging the […]
Tomatoes in November
this one yellow jaundice yellow maybe this one make it to red these others green shiny green like Christmas bauble did puncture my black soil too late for ripeness no red for them yet I make room range green grenades along my window sash though I well know November sun pale thin can detonate no […]
Daughter in Garden
It’s the last Sunday in August. I can just see her standing outside with her back against the wall facing away. She is poised as if waiting for something but there is nothing, only summer stillness. It is early. No one else is up. I hadn’t heard her unlocking the back door, but she must […]
Disco Night South London 1977
after Gwendolyn Brooks My first summer teaching, the Head of Year says we got permission to have a disco for our forms, the real deal – kids to supply the music, their own cool tunes, and the DJs. Two boys set up lights so we nip off to the loos and change, teacher gear left […]
Boys
Last June my sister released a young cockerel in the university arboretum after it revealed its gender, crowing experimentally in a hoarse voice. Her husband used to wring the necks of the cocks while listening to hip-hop but he left. Now I’m at the garage filling up with petrol and pinned to the counter is […]
Honeyed
On long evenings, the Grans will embellish on this: how a branch of our family, the Mead bloodline, is infused, they say, with a strange sixth sense. They take a sip and begin. How my aunt, even now talks to her late husband, gets his opinion while running a bath or watering geraniums. And the […]
Lockdown Afternoons
The empty beer cans are left neat on the garden bench; the bench where he sits outside at the front of the house, because that is where the sun shines in the afternoon. He must need that, I think, to sit in the sun, to feel its warmth on his skin. I see him, […]
60, 71, 30.18, SW 1, Little Rain
I will die on a day of fair weather, pray to God. A last log of air. I will lay aside rain. If I had learned to shut light in a cylinder! My eye was always other. I saw blue where God made red. No matter. An end to noting patterns of the sky. A […]
Hoar Frost
i.m. John Hume There are days I am back there, Six years old, with my sibling, damp haired, at the open fire, on beanbags (one Superman, one Victoria Plum). We are swaddled in blankets, cereal bowls loaded with Maltesers, Fruit Pastilles and Cadbury’s Buttons. I’m craving the A team, my brother Knightrider. BA Baracus won’t […]
Look-see
after Hokusai’s Sazai Hall at the Temple of the Five Hundred Arhats you hold my hand not noticing the lavender in my other hand the sky is not blue mother like my ignored love token at last I can rest untangle the cutting strap oh my sore shoulders we are invisible here with mountains more […]
When you were sewing with your perfect vision what did you stitch?
If I step back three times, to my mother’s mother’s mother, I know only that you could thread a needle without glasses when you were old, ah, yes, it is true that you had two husbands, one died from a fall when riding, what happened to the other? hush, child, things happen that you […]
Christine Marshall
Christine Marshall comes from a fine art background and is currently completing her MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths. Christine writes poetry and memoir. She has self-published a pamphlet of poems called Seam, and a novella The Last Time I Saw Richard. She is currently working on a collection of ekphrastic poems.
Madeleine Wurzburger
Madeleine Wurzburger works as an EFL teacher in Richmond, and has published two poetry pamphlets: Sleeve Catching Fire at Dawn (Poetry Business Competition Winner 2018) and Only a Few are Looking at the Sky at the Right Moment (Agnes Kirk Press 2019).
Frances Malaney
Frances Malaney is a member of Ribble Valley Stanza and teaches on a part-time basis.
About me
My Hinge bio says travel photographer / amateur barista / debut forthcoming from a publisher you haven’t heard of / anticapitalist pop-up shop founder / found my latest calling / when my Hollywood career stalled / sordid story / identity theft / I try not to talk about that these days faked my own death […]
Everything you’ve always wanted
I was outside the Salvation Army building licking the cream from the rim of my hot chocolate when a man appeared beside me and said, You’ve won! Won what? I said, wiping my moustache with a finger to make sure I didn’t have cream on my face. Everything! he said, You’ve won it all! He […]
Novelty Race
Three-legged, most kids rollick along, like good-natured argument. Naturally, the twins get it right and stride off in time like a well-made dovetail joint, a catamaran, or scull. They pulse out in front, pulse to the Finish line – laugh as they double or halve their one sporting moment in […]
Making History
In all my years of sewing embroidery in Kent, I never believed in chance, so I took great care to get the bones of this story to be tapestried, so was obliged to hear several men’s witness. I am also used to tapestries being their proper size and shape, so when Bishop Odo lessoned us […]
The puzzle room
The waterfall is complex: white foam spilling over black rock, two centimetres wide. Marion slams each piece into its rural setting and rebuilds the cottage with no roof. I try to distract her with a map of the world, tracing routes and jig-sawn borders. She sings Angola, Namibia and South Sudan, her fingers landing on […]
A convocation of pylons considers how to celebrate country-wide conversion to renewable energy
Were they to dance – the girdered piecemeal sky would limber up, cables would be swung for skipping ropes, there would be sparks – fierce fire in stuttered arcs, in zig-zag strike on latticed steel, zinged buzz of seared scar, they would be clad – skeletal frames in kirtled folds […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Father Field
Grown from our cuttings and darkstuff. Believe me when I say – it was child’s play, starting them off on blotting paper, a drop of whisky here, a few tears there, before potting them on in soil rich in creosote and engine oil, staking them with the old paint sticks. Like grandfather before us we […]
First Year
Oh, Tom, I’m wearing my lucky pants in the reading room but you still turn away. Come back. I’d like one night with you. I’d like every slow day in your arms. I can’t read this Bible; I’m taking my time but the lines run away into the rain. I’m a cat on an ice […]
‘Each ant will one day be an Indra’
Each ant will one day be an Indra thunderer whose chariot is the sun who answers prayers with lightning splits mountains to bring rain for now I’ll live quietly behind these eyes and watch the young blind to what’s brewing or I could become old woman of the sea grip Sinbad with my wrinkled thighs […]
Taking the Ice Line
Each train is announced by its porcelain tinkle. The glow in the tunnel expands to a blue-white gleam. Inside the capsule, the seats are wet. The floor is slippy and dangerous. In some towns, guards throw buckets of sand in at every stop. Here, we pride ourselves on a pristine look and lower the temperature. […]
Word Clouds
The arguments of lovers condense in cars, then fall as windscreen tears. Speeches cause rainbows. Wedding guests spatter their chat like dew on the lawns of parsonages. It dampens marquees. All the words ever uttered cloud the sky, queueing to recycle the waters of Noah. Baby’s first word and all of our word-strings, float in […]
Deep Field
A moth’s wing stammered in the air vent I unzipped on one side of the bell tent. Tea lights spent their carbon in a lantern that panicked stars onto the canvas. Outside, deep field, you pointed at a moon so real your finger came back dusty. We stared like telescopes at our past – that […]
The stopper
lifted and all we did undoes, unfixes beneath this weight of days retuned to weightlessness in wilderness, each field or beach and every forest found, that late-night bath we ran, my fingers parting tangled strands, our tracks in crops or sand then every moon phase slowly foaming […]
Griglan (Heathland)
High above the serpent-rock, on any given summer/autumn day, your aptitude is mocked. No longer can it wander to the south or east in search of ghost-ships/sleeping saints. Intelligence has brought the livestock home to the cliff – to stand, with the blessed plants, oblique, and call back the chatter of choughs. Into the high […]
In the Timeless University
after W. S. Graham He lost a lifetime in the stacks and special collections, heard only the chafe of thumbs on that card index, the dry spine of an archive whose words made no voice in his head, dropped instead like pebbles into a mineshaft. But what was the work of the Chair of Silence? […]
Bi-polar
after Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples – Joseph Wright of Derby, oil on canvas, c. 1776 Yet something can be two things at once: fire and granite, moon and water, vision and pigment; oil and soul. Sulphur seas roil beneath our feet, a cloud’s mutability is […]
Prism
after Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Blue veins thin silver scars white skin. Slice sharp glisten this bijection: emptiness to fill with snow blitzeis fractal twigs smoky sky sunset breaks fire from ice.
The Beast in Cyberspace
Log off. Delete. There’s no worth here. To search for reason within the Cloud through high-speed Fibre, honestly don’t waste your time. That wail announcing entitled arrogant self-destructing fanboys’ latest hill to die on. If you crave freedom of speech I’d mute the beast then block his mates through curation, less grief associates. The beast […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Blitz Hits The Langham, Most Haunted Hotel in England
and then a mirror flew from the wall a woman’s nose was pierced with glass swelled like an apricot until she could barely squint she said she saw through her eyelids said she saw amongst the pigeon-droppings, splintered gilt an absence tossing our careful bandages down the stair like there was […]
Hotel Palarine
When we’re not back till nine one night she embraces us and leads us to dinner, Rosalina from Argentina, who hears my accent and tells us she loves New York, who used to visit every year, sometimes twice a year, and at nineteen looked after a boy in a town outside Darien. Now he’s twenty-six, […]
Hotel
They don’t rent rooms to the likes of me but here’s the trick: drift between the box trees, pass beneath the pear drop chandelier like you own the place. The lifts are my freight trucks: open, free, sighing between each gilded possibility. I tread the carpets, furlong after furlong, breathe the corridor narcotics of furniture […]
Heaven on the 7th Floor
Exiles from the violence in Jamaica, they were looking for good times and laughter, so making eyes to the Bee Gees on the dancefloor soon led to secret mid-week trysts. Jenny and Footy, cruising the lanes of the Trans-Canada Highway in his blacked-out Cadillac, booking in at different Ramada Inns, but always a room on […]
View from a Travelodge Window
Looking out over the platforms of Clapham Junction station, the estate where I lived when we first met named after a Russian cosmonaut, we marvel at the trains, the tracks, the lucky or unlucky carriages, the gaps our younger selves slipped through, the end-points we could have chosen or been taken to, that somehow it’s […]
Country House Hotel
a pigeon on the roof chants his morning prayer a child’s bare feet slap against the wooden floors voices lift and fall beyond the boundaries of my life from far away the news of family illness heavy roof trusses criss-cross above our heads lay bare the effort of holding things up
Judith
Today she stopped fasting, ripped off the old grey track suit and white t-shirt, gave up her prayers, had a warm bath; bubbles floated around her shoulders, tickled her back. In the dawn, buzzing of planes in the air, rattling of guns in the valley. Men. She stood, drops slid around her waist and hips, […]
Dressmakers
I think of her dresses: cream sateen with beige flower print, wide-collared, three-quarter cuffed sleeves, full skirt – rainbow-striped silk, straight and sleeveless, thin belted. As a girl, she told me, she stood still while her grandmother wielded the scissors to cut neckline and armholes freely. Her mother, more the designer, added hand-crocheted trimmings, buttons […]
Wreck
From Nîmes it came through the valleys, up the single-track road. Two gendarmes and the mayor, our neighbour Bernard too, watched as thirty tons of iron and steel unfolded, an origami limb dropping the line – straps in place, it hoisted the car twenty, forty feet, the river pouring from it, half a […]
Chess at Baden-Baden, 1925
In those days, the grandmasters wore suits, hired, borrowed or family heirlooms. Waiters patrolled the lines of tables, bearing espresso, hock, small packs of Camels. Spectators sat in velvet armchairs, some making notes, some waiting for the orchestra. Army cadets manned the demonstration boards, watching for the signs that a move would soon be born: […]
Small Hours
We need to retrieve some scent from a luminous rose that glows in our garden in the small hours. Plant-light softens the darkness. A flourish of pink elegance above the summer border gone to seed.
Composing Herself
1930s. Childhood holiday snaps, Llandudno, Filey. I can see it there already – the consciousness of her limbs as a series of compositions, an attenuation of parts that will become the official portrait. Around her, the aura of invisible mitres as the glue sets on the frame that will turn the art of being into […]
Room Six
Not for me the clean sweep of ocean, the Atlantic’s glittering haul, the sleeping bulk of Mull across the Sound: give me this out-of-season garden with its corrugated plastic greenhouse, its broken trellis and the outline of a door frame bleached into grass. Last night I unpacked, cranked up the radiator, jammed the wonky door […]
Brewing
In the dark Webby Webster hears Ma and Pa splitting the night open with saw-tooth words, and up creaks the stink of something brewing, something she sees when she sneaks downstairs, bubbling in its giant plastic bucket, waiting to go in the brown barrel with the leaky tap. When he forgets to hang the yoghurt […]
Sea Lily
My eldest daughter, sixteen this week, is hollering from the tub for a towel. From her window she sees all the way to the coast – we are close but we do not flood. On Jupiter’s moon, Europa, there is a sea where underwater lilies wait for discovery. Free-swimming larvae grow into juveniles fixed to […]
Watching Promise
across The Square, from under the tabby nets, it seems a client has left her a gift. My guess is a filthy finger nail got married to her oily hip and fathered some pus just out of reach because she’s using some dirty dance moves to squeeze it. Promise knows this isn’t like the handjobs […]
Cutting the Strings
I’m mute now in the public ward, waiting, wanting at bitter last for you to die, easy-out and instant like a best-loved dog. Your flesh is rusting iron, the tang of borrowed blood, sacs of it splashing your veins, out again past the crippled backdoor. Nothing can save you now. Needle in, needle out, they […]
A Brickie’s Tale
They had started work on the footings the day before, almost completing a hollow pier some eight or nine feet high, then leaving the rest until that morning, when heaving up the granite coping stone, alarmed by sudden sounds inside, they lowered the stone back to the ground. Somebody went up again, shone a match […]
Weatherproofing
I use the blade of a screwdriver to prise off the lid of the tin; a soft pop releases vapours of solvent and resin. I stir with a stick dip the brush and sweep over the boards in long strokes. The liquid soaks into the grain easily absorbed: soon it will harden under the skin. […]
A Doctor’s Questions
Tell me, Mrs Foster, what does the barometer read today? How do the clouds look? Are they lowering? Can you feel any dampness in the air? Should I take my good coat? Did you notice if the large hole in the track has been filled in? What do you mean the farrier couldn’t shoe Dobbin? […]
Early Winter
It’s not a frozen spoon on your tongue. It’s a mildew eating everything, the path through the forest is pulp. The trees weigh up the bad choice and send a shunt to amputate each leaf. A cataract ripens on the surface of the sun. Still, the moss is more inviting now, soft spires; we could […]
Shadows and Light
After a night of rain a puddle remains cupped in stone as my bra cups my breast – shadowed perhaps, as the little lake is sunlit – an eye gazing at me with encouragement or irony I can’t translate as I await the MRI’s judgment.
The Westray Storm Witch
They call her spae-wife, those others, with her lick-spit potions, her do-good healing. Late at night, I’ve eyed her going about busy when the moon splits heaven, cold as glass, and a hare stops meadow-wise with a frozen shadow, eyes like bronze coins against the loaming. I tell them I’ve seen her seek out storms, […]
Degrees of Formality
The aching brown backbone in their porch: a limp prognostical belt of kelp. Further inside, the frozen rage of Grandad’s barometer. Dad would still tap the place its crafty bland face showed a frank dark cone of internal works. He swore its needle swung a querulous millimetre at the back of Rain. I’d pipe […]
By Longing
‘By Longing’ by Eleanor Hooker [pdf format]
Not again
When I came home that night you were raving to the shipping forecast in the kitchen, moving with the grace of a broken puppet and wearing the hair of the dog; his brown fur. I said you bring me peace like an earthquake. You turned on the smashed-up tiles and said watch what happens when […]
Names
I am trying to talk about you without mentioning your name, so I say: we went to see a film last night, meaning you and I, or she treats me very well, as in, you love me, or I’m going out for Indian tonight, implying a candle- lit dinner for two. It isn’t always easy […]
Considerations when Curating the Past
Sorting and divvying family photos, my sister and I find an old envelope. There’s a picture of mother and father before they were married, he’s smiling, his arm around her. Her face makes us shudder. It’s the only photo we’ve discovered where she looks as we remember her. Rose pushes it away, but I add […]
Sweetcorn
Rwanda, 2014 They appear at my doorway every morning: golden parcels, encased in leaves; sometimes avocadoes, peas. I don’t know the reason, maybe a greeting. I never hear him though later, perhaps, I’ll catch him walking under banana trees, where the track widens: the careful step, the stick, the tightened shawl, as children dip down […]
On Not Knowing
The nature of regret is delicate, a door that should have been there, but is not; what happened back up in the hills was a matter of luck, nothing personal – the fact of the forests, the leaf-moths, the fork in the road. (There are no images, save for the river running to sand, salt […]