If I had a gold locket with my husband’s picture in it – which I don’t, and I were dead – which I’m not, and I could still think while being dead – which I couldn’t, I’d be happy to think that some young woman with a penchant for the past had found my locket […]

People in the neighborhood called him The Writer because he loitered on certain corners for hours at a stretch, making notations in pocket-sized spiral notebooks. At all times of year he wore a dark dirty overcoat. At no time did he interact with passersby. The rumor went that he was a Lebanese man who, either […]

Once we were armourers to the gods. We fashioned Zeus’s thunderbolts, Poseidon’s trident, Artemis’s bow. We built the massive walls of Argos and Mycenae, and laboured in Hephaistos’ forge’s fiery glow. Zeus allotted us this land where grapes and corn and apples grow without the need to plough or sow.   Now we are shepherds […]

Her belongings, like skins,float back to the original effluvia of ocean beds.An archive of buttons, newly dyed with fish spawn,congealedwith masonry skill,disturbs the isotopes of an ocean’s plan.A crustacean, plotting the symmetries of a worldbetween its kelp stones,stares at the hems and petticoats trailing him.   The pink ghosts of muscles still fasten round the […]

Thora Dardel sees her portrait by Modigliani for the first time in forty-six years. I am not the woman you see sitting in the corner at the private view. My name is Dardel. In nineteen nineteen, in Montparnasse, I was painted by the dying Modigliani. He sketched me in a café. He devoured me with […]

In the end, we never made it to the Pavilion but preferred instead to imagine the gauche chinoiserie of Regency folly, a camp flourish of minarets standing out against the bitter English rain.   We closed our eyes and conjured faux Indian domes knocked out from a nation’s first concrete casts – brown and smooth […]

They’ve lived there for years, the aurox, Since the last inhabitants left them With the island, casting off Into the fierce conflicting tides.   Two bulls, four calves and six cows Roam the boggy fields, Hoof-prints like runes Across abandoned acres.   Once a year, a vet makes the journey. He watches them from a […]

No one can quite remember whether it was during the Select Committee or a cabinet meeting that he first whinnied, then flared his nostrils in the direction of the Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport. Certainly this wasn’t minuted and either way such things are often overlooked in Whitehall. You might have thought the formal […]

In the woods she skipped at my feet, swung on my arm, pestered for stories, as the dead leaves drifted down, and my wife, thoughtful, slightly apart, walked ahead, when my small daughter looked up to the high branches and pointed suddenly to the black bird which swooped clattering, from the bare tree-top, wheeling across […]

Jonathan Trappe had a dream, sitting in his office swivel chair, gazing vacantly out of the window. He imagined taking to the air. Just taking off; buying fifty-five huge helium balloons; a fantasia of reds, whites, greens, yellows and blues. And he saw himself in slow motion frames, inflating each one, tying each with string, […]

My tiny aunt was always afraid she might be blown away. She fluttered about in the draft of her house chasing snails that slid under the door. Each night she climbed a steepening stair to lie beneath the stars’ straining light, hidden in sodium glare. Her four room cave in the shade of passing buses, […]

The heroine lay dying in her pasteboard cot Seized by coughing, clutching with both hands The big tenor who knelt at her side It was too much I slipped from my seat, stumbled through feet and knees Mounted the stage in a burst of saving love For heaven’s sake, I said, she’s a sick woman […]

We buried him with a potato in each hand on New Year’s Day when the ground was hard as luck, wearing just cotton, his dancing shoes plus a half bottle of pear cider to stave off the thirst. In his breast pocket we left a taxi number and a packet of sunflower seeds; at his […]