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NPC 2013

I Stop Wearing the Mini-skirt, 1972

I listen to Jimi Hendrix, Foxy Lady, in the dark, drink milk in chilled cartons on Victoria Station. Beyond the factory hours of vacation working, I don’t know what I’ll do. The two of us deep in the forest, summer under two-man canvas, the tearing rasp of cows at night and will they see the […]

CCTV Central Control

Eight-hour shifts on rolling nights wouldn’t suit some – people with kids and a wife – but the money’s okay and I’m my own boss, in a way, or at least it feels like that when I pan across girls stamping their feet in the taxi rank, zoom in on men squaring up in the […]

crepuscule with nellie (take six)

we make choices. sometimes it’s watching phoebes erase moths from clover months after the family jaunt across texas: weather parroting miles & miles of trouble. dirt roads going nowhere or to a lozenge pattern: evidence of local color hiding something all over the place in the same kind of building. other times, we find ourselves […]

Birdfall

We were three hours at sea When the birds began to fall; Tired from the fog and cold, Some rested on the decks While we fished for food In that blind rolling water; Specks of beating life In a world too big to picture, They took off once more Into the mist and rain. We […]

Gift of the Sloth

To live like this demands a talent for hanging by toenails curved as a Balinese dancer’s for over a decade. For clinging the soft pendulum of your body to a tree (in wind, hail or heat) because your life depends on it. Even though your muscles are weak as ribbons, your eyes sightless buttons. It […]

Hare

I kept you in bed with me so many nights, certain I could hold the life into you, certain that the life in you wanted to leap out, hare-like, go bobbing off into some night-field. For want of more eyes, more arms I strapped you to me while I did the dishes, cooked, typed, your […]

Push-bike

She wrapped a tea-towel around buns or a brack, packed sandwiches into a bread-bag and strapped me into the seat on the back. I pressed against her, arms around her waist, her strong swimmer’s legs pushing us up the brae, (legs that had saved a child from a whirlpool one day in Donegal). Long grasses, […]

Love on a Night Like This

Outside, air is balancing itself. We can hear branches in motion, some twigs breaking, wires like violin strings, trees breathy as bass flutes. The acoustics of friction. The science of equilibrium isn’t at all easy. Effort is needed to walk against the wind. Love isn’t easy. Something – a plastic pot or a chair – […]

Bernard and Cerinthe

If a flower is always a velvet curtain onto some peepshow he never opens, it’s a shock to find himself sheltering from the storm in a greenhouse, seduced by a leaf blushing blue at the tips, begging to be stroked. He’s caught in the unfamiliar ruffle of knickerbockers or petticoat, a scent of terror, vanilla […]

Among Barmaids

There was a metal door that took both hands  of a strong man to open   but we did it daily. Inside were our charges, sealed in submarine darkness. We swam   through their booze, past the pool table’s alien island, darts that thwacked the pricked wall   like failure itself, spinning like downed ducks […]

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