We stand at the door and watch the pale night, you, my twelve pounds of grackle bird, seagull boy, oblivious to the moonlight and what lies beyond – the foxes silently slipping through fences, robbers waiting in their cars for a gap in their nerves. A helicopter rides overhead, restless and searching. It’s all right […]

(note: a quarrel is an old name for a diamond-shaped pane of glass used in making lattice windows) I love to think of them standing on a bench outside the Angel, Walter Bogan, John Tucker, 8 in the evening Nicholas Gay, William Amyott, a candle on the table, Edward Rounsevall, taking turns to stand on […]

i.m. James Agee What are you going to tell us, Bud; about the days that keep coming and rain and wind and the sour smell of shacks and empty fields and the silence of women? How do you look your children in the eye and what stories can there possibly be to hide the intimidation, […]

89. Incident on the Horikiko Coast (30/07/78) Young couple alone, he recumbent on red rock near pinnacle of sand-hill pocketed with grass, she by his feet, sky making threat of raindrops though earth remaindered dry. Mid-afternoon, adjacent to sun’s zenith, she touching ground at plural potions of her body, while lightning conflaged cracked dead-bush 6m […]

My first wife knew no more than me, no telling where her needs ended, mine began. One day though I turned the hill to find the boat moored in the field, the house out in the bay, adrift, door open wide. I rowed out to a message on the mat: gone to my cousin’s place […]

Thirty years dead and still curmudgeonly, my grandfather is driving me through the fog-numbed streets of Crystal Palace at five a.m. He’s in the plaid dressing gown he wore to die in, and he’s shaved, badly, flecks of dark blood stippling his chin. We’re the only Austin 1100 on the road; he tuts, crunching through […]

Preparez – vous à des ragouts, De rats aux champignons d’egouts’ Victor Hugo, Paris 1870   All night Krupps’ cannons pound the walls, darkness smells of soil and gas and at Voison’s, rue Cambon, a special black card buys sauce souris on pate of rat.   It’s a challenge to garnish donkey with cepes; there’s […]