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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

 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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

   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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 – […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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             […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

                       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 […]

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 […]

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? […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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       […]

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. 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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]