for Michael Hofmann The magician Márquez had a dread of gold and wouldn’t wear it. But here I am sitting through Aussie Gold Hunters – that’s enjoyed a lockdown boom, perhaps for the lure of hidden treasure, or because these stubbly mates have put their lives on hold to scour a red desert under a […]

This is a grave. Melancholic in the middle of wind and rain, sad and staying silent, lonesome and lonely, the earthy lump is forever. What’s under this grave? We don’t even think about what’s under this grave. Most likely a deep hole has been dug. So that a little bit of material – human bones, […]

Everything you told me came untrue, as if your eye at the witching hour, when you told us bedtime stories, was faulty on its target. Perhaps your seer’s hands, smooth and oiled from washing up, slipped in their tracing of force-lines on your crystal ball. Maybe your too-hasty breath flustered the tea leaves, distorted picture […]

is a slack pith helmet, a spaceship shrunken above his denizen grin he flashed me once in Bremen, his English the dark gaps of Boethius’ cell, racked with limpid Low German on the radio. We were outside the station, waiting to go up when a breeze threatened to lift the hat and I leapt, not […]

A relic out of time and place. My grandfather, down in his garden rising and falling to the rhythm of work days before death, the bone trowel in hand. This is us, he said, scooping holes in the earth, half teaching me the work and half telling me the work is what you are. Hacked […]

A smolder, an echo of shame, the weary wick of it. In the smudgy Local section, a fire living underground for half a century will be put out. An ember tossed into a mine shaft within a mile of my house, some midnight by a tired anonymous, that person surely dead now, the consequence roaming […]

I leave the pool, dripping and in my swim shorts, and I stumble around the lobby, eyes searching wildly, until the hotelier comes over with a question on his face, and I ask him what happened, and he shrugs and casts about for someone to dump responsibility onto, and his eyes land on a young […]

She has, as chimney sweepers, come to dust. And bitten it. She has given up the ghost and lies in cold obstruction there to rot where angelstubs perfect untimely frost, now she. Frights me thus living flesh does yield soft saply to the axe’s edge. Has gasped her last, pegged out, gone west. Mislaid the […]

His touch is like the touch of a bandage, soft but slightly sinister, or berries, and being touched makes her feel good the way it feels good to feel helpless.

He appeared in March, self-enchanted, rooting up hyacinths, staring into the greenhouse, through the kitchen window, a stray from woodlands where others roosted with that chucking sound he never uttered. Until one day he was on the roof outside the casement where I’m writing now, head tilting blazing bronze and green, an exultation, an opulent […]

Kum… yali, kum buba tambe – Virginia Hamilton The bird minstrels shrill vulgar mimetics of my folklore’s song. In whispered incantations, wings scar clean from my back, shake shadows like pools of night over slave quarters mangled with cotton. A mouth makes me a belonging, curves me clamoring into a half-circle like a brow cradling […]

Mother what is a man? Put on your red hat, but don’t let a man see you wearing red. Mother what is a man? A man is a piece of burnt toast, a glass of vinegar. Never pour a man into your eye, never eat one at night. Mother what is a man? The white […]

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made… – Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye You brushed her hair when your mother was ill, sunlit silk, hot sand slipping through fingers by the creek, not of burnt sugar spun in air. You stared at it, trying to make some […]

Until now, I have not been able to do them as I feel them; the emotions that come over me in the face of nature can be so intense that I lose consciousness, and the result is a fortnight during which I cannot do any work. However, before leaving here [St-Remy] I mean to have […]

after Ovid Twice upon a time my fluid mother born of water said no and no to my poor father living with sheep: all rivers screamed like Munch’s blue-black fjords and the lambs’ tongues twisted towards the orange sky. I was a product of an inter-terrestrial marriage, pasture- blood. Animals hated me, especially sheep, and […]

Arion, who created the dithyramb, who invented tragedy, to whom we owe the fact that to this day fifty satyrs sing the chorus to our every song, would never have agreed to board the ship without a retinue, would not have fallen for a lesser ruse or succumbed to a bag over the head – […]

I was the coward. The others were calm. They knew what they had to do. Our cousin Zen was there, she had done this before. Zen is a happy person. She made us giggle in the waiting room, while the funeral director was telling us everybody have a sense they will pass about say maybe […]

It is forbidden to spit on cats in plague-time. – Albert Camus, The Plague, translated by Stuart Gilbert i. mark You have ruined your eyes reading by candlelight, and singed your wings – white feathers smudged like Ash Wednesday, in this, the year of the plague. You have saved her voice and when she speaks […]

…grape vines actually perform better when nutrients are scarce… These conditions cause the vine to focus more energy on survival and less energy on growing grapes… and each grape has more character, concentration, and quality. – Winefolly.com The harder an entity has to work for something, the greater it will be rewarded in the end. […]

This is our fear of ‘the other’ – Indians, blacks, Mexicans, Communists, Muslims, whatever – America has to have its monsters, so we can zone them, segregate them, if possible, shoot them.     – Robin Robertson, from The Long Take i. April 29, 1992 This is not your city. What burns and whose likeness with […]

for H.M. She writes: time is passing very fast here. You go to the pet store, buy a kitten, take it home, clean its suppurating eyes with a Q-tip – don’t tremble! It starts purring, very loudly, then it’s a ball of dust. And the waterfalls! The majestic waterfalls! Each of them seems to be […]

I’ve leaned towards the edge of the sky along the curved railings; where the sun falls aslant on the gaunt green hills… How will I survive the moonrise for one more evening, or the sound of dew dripping from my leaking parasol when it would be so much easier to die and die and keep […]

He was ridiculously good-looking. He was even Nigerian − though Mum flits between this being a good thing in people and the worst. I pulled his photo up on the internet, showed her. She decided, on the spot, his Nigerianness was a good thing. It was easy to pull his photo up on the internet […]

I turned the corner and spied a nice shell. I clamped onto the arm, pulled out the body and crawled in. I heard the sea inside. I crawled along the beach. It was light and the shell was cracked. I went under a rock. I went under a rock. I went under a rock. I […]

I turned the corner and spied a nice car. I opened the door, pulled out the driver and got in. I played music on the radio. I drove along the road. It was dark and the lights were broken. I screamed around the corner and knocked another car into a lamppost. I swapped vehicle for […]

I went to the judge and asked for interim relief. He said, “What job, what relief?” At Security they’d frisked us for pearl-handled lady pistols and stained Tupperware. At 10 a.m. I stood up to address the court. All I wanted was to dutifully inherit this small patch of useless land, its parched soil rarely […]

What do we do when we’re done scooping rice? I wanted to ask what the procedure was, after we’re done with things. After the dishes what heaven? After the car is parked what casual thing other than boredom? All around you, the preparations are being made for the great event, each syringe is lain, each […]

can’t   stop   thinking   –   of   all the  things  we  didn’t  ask  for – bad   ankles   the   beige  carpets we’re   given   in   rented   rooms –    brooms    knocking   against the    floor   from  below   –  the downstairs     neighbour      who hates  me  – and  by  downstairs neighbour  I   mean […]

When she asked, in her less matriarchal voice, whether I had spoken to you lately, I responded with a gentle no, wondering why. She mentioned Uncle D had spotted Big Mummy in the hospital. Her tiny frame wrapped from the brisk wind outside, wearing her bold yet formal bifocal glasses. Uncle D saw her in […]

they told us to watch for omens signs in the sky flashes of sick & warning light as if anyone could read symbols distant explosions they told us when it happens whatever someone will know reading the clouds i know i am far too late for low & sultry dawn i want your animal breath […]

The beautiful geometry the trees become                         each winter here is beginning to blur at the edges and                         the robin we think must be a little deranged has for the third time                         in as many years returned from wherever she goes for sun and                         […]

because it is      hidden, secret (geheim),                  & all traces of it       impenetrable,                  distant, like sirens                  blissfully                               sounding in the dark, what enters             so assiduously                            broken is also             what ends – the enforced meaning (Stop! Police! – how it enters the fray)             after all                               no […]

Southern Vietnam will be submerged by 2050. – Saigoneer, Oct 2019 Every place has a name for this. Here, it is tận thế. A fortune once told me that rain is worth everything and so I knew that it held all we had ever burned – pork skewers, begging letters, hell money, my great-grandmother’s remains, […]

Always the big cat enclosure first, their moans swelling the bell curves of our brags. Tigers – drugged of course – stretched out on rocks across a moat: meagre Lakshman rekha for the two drunks with garlands, short work. The pong of spoonbills, whisked by scamper. A cockatoo on the mesh wiring climbing beak-and-claw. Between […]

I have begun the purge. Month of hunger, raindrops fall from window sills, ice slithers in puddles, the smoky breath of animals greets the air. Morning’s back already broken, veins obvious on everything. Emptying myself of all things ripe and wanton, I am winter grass. Observe me survive as earth’s shoulder blades that jut, cut […]

What a beautiful day for a wedding! It was raining when we buried my mum, she loved lilacs and here they are, the lilac lilacs like pendulous large breasts dripping with dew, I am enjoying them alone with my mug of coffee, which I also enjoy with the intensity of a remark made in a […]

started 2000, finished 2019 for W.C., who encouraged me to finish what I’d started My daddy was Irish and famous – “Well, sort of Irish and sort of famous,” he said – and told the truth. He loved and he was loved, and was a joker,        and in his youth he’d passed the eleven-plus […]

The trees I’ve glimpsed from the window of a night train were the saddest trees. They seemed about to speak, then –           vanished like soldiers. The hostesses handed out starched linens for sleep. Passengers bent over small icons of sandwiches. In a tall glass, a spoon mixed sugar into coffee banging its silver face against […]

The National (UAE) reported that the Philippines’ top export is “its people”. The Guardian (UK) reported that the Philippines provides the third highest number of National Health Service staff overall. take a walk / over the sharp stones / then come back – Pablo Neruda i. Elbow to elbow on waiting chairs. We rummage through […]

If you dig a hole and get in it,                                                      what then?               If you, say, flick a tree and holler,                                                      then what?                                          If you reverse into an attitude of dotty surrender, all flags flying, the sky as blue               as an unblown whistle, the children dancing,                           well what’s next […]

Look, how she teeters in a tight skirt          on high heels over the cobbled street, past Heffers’ gabled windows and knobbly glass,          the music of wartime dance bands still inside her – what does she know of madrigals and choirs,          my adolescent self, in her first term? She dreams of Soho clubs and Raymond Chandler. […]

It wasn’t a date, I don’t know what we were doing there at MOMA together, I don’t know which painting we were standing in front of – gilded, plump, wiggle-lipped cream-pitcher, ladies’ hair like naked-lady nether-hair, and the most erotic light I had seen, I was nineteen, I turned and kissed his mouth and held […]

The harshness in a human face adores its closeness to the bone. It glories in refusing to yield. It patrols its own numbed attitude sealed off from another’s despair, to guard its air of being strong. A fox that strolls in broad daylight has something shameful to disown: a half-buried relic he’s scraped up, worried […]

Power Plant MY DARRYL DOESN’T LIKE TO EAT VEGETABLES one aunt, Jutta, said sternly to the other, Jude, and thus their estrangement began. They hated each other with perfect savagery, and so they presented each other with lavish gifts. First, Jude gave Jutta an enormous book of photographs of water: the ideal gift for the […]

My father’s given name was James Brown. He had his surname legally changed to Holiday because he loved Billie Holiday, whose first name was Eleanora Fagan, and he hated the peculiar institution. Besides that another black James Brown, the King of Soul, already had a recording career when my dad was starting his in New […]

Bone monkey has set up shop in the airing cupboard. It’s warm in there. Silverfish take refuge in his skull and slide around his ribs. Worn sheets have ruched between his bones like the petals of old roses – Assemblage des Beautés for instance – so cherry red and full it almost seems there is […]

1. Generation it takes a man to generate a man – Aristotle Hobbes considers the species reproducing itself through his cunt. He considers a horse chestnut tree in late April: lamblit green pushing against its own brown ability to reason – spineless pre-foliage anxious to make more of itself. He considers loins; jet-lagged adrenaline, their […]

I There was the prandial-comfort of entertaining a few old cronies. The assurance, when the power went, each friend round the table was entertaining thoughts as infantile and forbidden as my own. One friend is convinced we’re players in a computer game. She and I argued the toss. Now happily I entertain the thought I […]

after Tarfia Faizullah i was hurt      i wasn’t      i saw it on the internet      licked yogurt from a spoon while the girls described their blood      hot      seizing the cotton of a sheet      i am speaking from the cut place      from my other mouths      do not believe me for i was never cut      or      i was hurt but never sewn      or      i wasn’t      i want -ed it      i didn’t      i screamed      i […]

“Three qualities make us adults: to give things their proper names, not to use another’s suffering like a baby uses that of its mother, third, to approach the end serenely.” You say the end and not death – that’s what people say when they’re halfway there – but I don’t want to end. The proper […]

Day Forty-nine The warm buoyant breaths don’t miss you The winds that have left for reincarnation before you, that brush against the lips of your childhood don’t miss you The winter, the woman’s ice heart, dead from sickness, drifting away in the infinite blue sky with thin needles stuck all over it doesn’t miss you […]