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 […]
Poetry Review
Death of an Actress
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 […]
Berries
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.
Cock Pheasant
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 […]
The Flying African
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 on Men
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 […]
Hair
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 […]
Cypress
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 […]
Vitreous Humour
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
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 – […]
Washing the body
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 […]
from traces
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 […]
a constitution
…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. […]
The Nineties
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 […]
Letter from the Foothills
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 […]
hotboxing
Poem Beginning with Lines from Ye Hongxiang*
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 […]
Red Hoover
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 […]
Sunset
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 […]
Sunrise
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 […]
Thus I became a heart-eater
I was holding myself like an open flame at Candlemas, when the doughnut presented itself: glossy red and obscene. The same vague heart-shape of a woman’s face. I ate it in three bites, in the street, thinking of Valentine’s Day, how every year it manages to hurt my feelings. How when I was young I […]
Interim Relief
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 […]
The Injection Lesson
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 […]
The fear will make the meat grow closer don’t be scared
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 […]
How It Started
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 […]
from Bad Moon
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 […]
Epithalamion
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 […]
Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
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 […]
Fragments of my mother’s homeland underwater
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, […]
Alipore Zoo
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 […]
January
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 […]
birdknacks
birds have got these world-counteracting smart-alec knacks: techno-turbojet shoulders and hup… they alone got plucked off lesbos on the salty sea breeze, while the wingless and flightless were powerless, even to get a mention in the press. feeling guilty about my rightful guiltlessness, i ate nonetheless and drank, played scrabble, slept in. lesbos under a […]
Seams
In time all cities blur and connect as each street remembers another, remembers the downward pressure on your temple as the plane rises, rises, as the lights of one city are gurgled by fog, and what’s left is one more night between time zones. What glow here. What unbreakable seams. You know the earth, like […]
On Form
Standing at pump four of the garage in Ballydehob filling the Honda with diesel, I want the counter to stop at a round number, a whole euro, so if the tank’s getting full and the flow’s clicking off I restart, easing out my finger then tightening the trigger until the digit ticks to zero. I […]
Ice Baby
When I hear what is happening in America I turn back on myself, crouch on the landing where no light falls and wait for the piglet in her sniffle to unlung. Like I know the full farmyard of her discontents and which corn snack to invoke against rainfall, I know no bailiff is coming to […]
Stone Tape Theory
Whosoever has pushed a tear of bread into a glossy pool of gravy has entered history paying the ticket price, playing statues as they lift to their mouths a fine brine of self, striking the figures of those minor gods who light the mineral tapes of creek and cliff: the shirtless walker raising his palm […]
[Zeus] Anatomical Dolls
It’s hard to explain. Let me show you with the anatomical dolls. They have buttons for eyes and details under their pants you wouldn’t believe – look underneath at the girl’s folded labia, vagina, the tucked-in silk-and-string umbilical of a pull-down, poppet foetus, or the male’s miniature penis, his cotton-bag scrotum, his sphincter ringed in […]
A Morning Person
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 […]
Like Father
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 […]
Nocturne for a Moving Train
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 […]
Group Portrait at the Stopover
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 […]
Contingency
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 […]
Sacred and Profane
This poet once told me, poetry is pure. You have to approach words with the fear of God the way you hold an ancient Torah scroll found in an archaeological dig. And underground, in the trenches of meaning, poets engrave letter by letter in a tablet like idol worshippers in the name of the holiest […]
St Lucy’s Day
for JH We are half way through the dark time. They know it in their roots, the winter trees: What am I working at, an old poet, sitting over the keys? Today, I caught a glimpse of my face in a photograph and made out pathos in the lines of my mouth […]
Cambridge 1949
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. […]
Kara Jackson
Commended in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2016 and 2017, Kara Jackson has been both the Youth Poet Laureate of the USA (2019) and the Youth Poet Laureate of Chicago (2018-19). She won the literary award at the 2018 Louder Than a Bomb finals selected by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize […]
The Butter Festival
You can have all the other sadnesses, the yellow leaf on the burnt path, the silverware hopelessly scratched, the evening news and the morning news, the funeral, the rotgut, the crappy tag sale, the dead fish seasoning the shore, the memorial, the wake, the Ono no Komachi poems, all of April 1998, the lunar new […]
Flèche
History At the age of thirteen, I wielded a blade because I had a firm grip, I was in love with Shakespeare, and the school team needed an épéeist. When my mother flew to Linz to watch me go 3–4 down against a former champion, she gripped the railing until her marriage ring was folded […]
Plot
(in Hills Cemetery) Seen it. The plot & like it. In all particulars. Rough grass soon to be mown. The handful of ants clambering up the harsh green stalks then down. £437. A snip. I’ll take it with its unseen complimentary worms. The only earth I’ll ever own around me wrapped tight.
Bonnard Aria
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 […]
Fuck / Symphonies
after Beethoven for Zahzee Months from now it will happen again / in gin-and-juice loose-tongued-stupor / I’ll be like fuck classical music / fuck those elitist dudes in dark suits / there’s nothing I haven’t seen J Dilla do / that dude with a MIDI and a Mac composed the whole world right on wax […]
Another Agony in the Garden
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 […]
from I Become a Delight to My Enemies
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 […]
Then I Found Harmony Brown
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 […]
I Miss the Slug Ooze of That Summer You Died
I put a slug on my knee and watched it crawl down my leg. A frenzy of night itching, blood, and waking to a constellation of scabs. And I walked in tall grass. And I stood so still under the sun. I got very sick for two weeks. I lay in bed thinking I might […]
Interrogation
How does the girl come to be? Talc at the back of her neck to stop the sweat from jeweling, to stop the black-eyed shine of the evil eye. Is the girl beholden? She is years of yeses in the making, her eyes button-shut against the world beyond her upstairs window, beyond the hundred jeweled […]
Her Flowers
Just before she died, my grandmother glanced out of her bedroom window and saw her garden bloom one last time – with white chrysanthemums, lavender peonies, prize dahlias, cascades of red-hot pokers, delphinium sparks. Did the fireworks wake her? Muzzy from sleeping pills, my grandmother got out of bed and started to go downstairs, missed […]
[episode]
Bite the tape and have it wrapped around the wound, by sundown, buddy. Carvings; white shirts. You have seen so many things, etc. Hello, switchboard? Get me the engineer. These toy soldiers are covered in dust. There is a weight that will not budge. Switchboard switchboard, the tap in the basin won’t stop dripping. I […]
from The white jumper
1 Running and jumping from one grassy platform to another I stop. On the next patch of grass. Branches so arranged as to focus a beam of light on it. White and gleaming against the green of the grass. The white jumper. The white jumper. The white 4 We were sitting […]
Past Name Days
I grew up in the shadow of Anna days. Kinga left unmarked. The Anna-fest already in swing. I stand in a cloak. An Anna and an Anna and an Anna. I exist too! No sound comes. No words in my mouth. I’m swallowed up. Quickly forgotten. Corrupted by the memories. My pieces are transported over […]
Rain Born under a Leo Sign
Tonight a high north wind blows off my cumulonimbus clouds. (Let it escort my love away.) Wet fallen leaves scatter over the autumn earth. (Let it nestle against my heart!) The calmest heartbeat is the transient silence before a storm. A knife piercing through life comes from a dove’s sad tears. Against the backdrop of […]
Assemblage des Beautés
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 […]
Untitled / Villanelle
I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway. – Grace Paley Because having a father made me want a father. – Sandra Newman I have often longed to see my mother tap-dance in a top hat like she did before he died – having (had) a father made me want a father. […]
from Thomas Hobbes (1588–) Works Motherhood
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 […]
During the Recent Thunder & Lightning
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 […]
Self-Portrait without Stitches
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
“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 […]
A Young Man’s Song
A young man should be faithful, keep company with chivalrous men – a jade brooch on his waist, his midnight-blue coat, emblazoned with kirin. In the morning, an audience with the King, then a ride to the village, Long Pleasure. He buys and drinks the most succulent wine, sitting among pretty flowers at sunset. The […]
Don’t
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 […]
Clast
When your mother dies there’s no one left to hold the sky. When I was small we lived on the top floor in Wimpole Street an attic window looking out on a forest canopy of silver tiles where an owl roosted in a revolving flue after […]
Rain Twice
i. Rain in a headtorch drifts sideways through the beam, slicks across a lemon moon and makes the woods a mystery of dog-scent, winter mulch. Pre-dawn, when Sharrow Vale and Psalter Lane lie down to weep proud as a grandmother and not your grandmother but mine – tears that never fall, caught by the landscape […]
The Present Is Constant Elegy
Those years when I was alive, I lived the era of the fast car. There were silhouettes in gold and royal blue, a half-light in tire marks across a field – Times when the hollyhocks spoke. There were weeds in a hopescape as in a painted backdrop there is also a face. And then I […]
Mercy Invincibility
We’re playing Super Mario. This level’s designed for one player and not two. The quick-collapsing platforms mean one always falls. But when he hits the spikes he starts to flash. The plumber turns invincible as a firewalker. A chance to extricate oneself. How often have our lives known that brief immunity – the crisis which […]
No Truce
This is the crystal ball that hides everything, but you toss in the equation. The cloud chamber’s walls will say something. The little goats draw near. I am as much a sphere as an angle, and I will give you no truce. Where is that rabbit that knows all by not knowing it? A serpent […]
Sound Machine
My mirth can laugh and talk, but cannot sing; My grief finds harmonies in everything – James Thomson And what comes out if it isn’t the wires dad welds to his homemade sound system which I accidently knock loose while he is recording Talk-Over dubs, killing the bass, flattening the mood and his muses […]
Spiritualist Church
I’ve never spoken to anyone of this – the Spiritualist church, its squat brick body, the mossy wall where snails congregate in worshipful hundreds on wet dusks. Every day that first winter, the winter I thought would bury us both, I walked past that church in sallow light carrying my son at my chest, my […]
dicks like jesus
three days of vestry weather and the pinot hitting a stomach raw to produce a lilac mood where simply everyone is watching we the shaved en cas d’incendie – skimming death’s-heads and dropping blows through intercourse pearl-bordered & replete with sense of whimsy – imagination unseemly after four years coiled on his pillow in pear-cut […]
[Extracts from Love]
Dad’s Dick Floppy dog tongue Pig’s snout Chip-shop sausage on Saturday afternoons Lyric I of Sunday lunches Meat protagonist Centre of all narrative dénouement Never read a book never cooked yourself A meal Switch on the oven O organiser of the family unit Avid keeper of numbers You’re full to the brim with flinching To […]
SAY
A brick-sized block of grey stone washed ashore on which was carved the word SAY. My dad picked it up at low tide and two months later found another, and another saying LES. We worked out that rather than a command – like Rilke’s flow – it was the name of an old firm, SAYLES, […]
Haruspex
October and the blown mushroom dissolves, its volva clubbed, its stalk and cap, its singed and musky gills. I’ve spent too long collapsed over this inwards dark disembowelled, gone to ground, fingering my own wet spills and bodily secretions, a dream in which I am fucking and weeping – my mind has been wrong for […]
After the Formalities
In 1481 the word ‘race’ first appears in Jacques de Brézé’s poem ‘The Hunt’. De Brézé uses the word to distinguish between different groups of dogs. In that hard year grandparents arrived on a boat with a war behind them and a set of dog leads. Bullet holes in the sofa. Burst pillows. Split rabbits. […]
Craquelure
At 5.56, some glitch, some distraction, some finger twitch, slips the phone from her grip and sends it smashing into the pavement. We all flinch. Soon, the bus jolts us through streets and suburbs and into the dark. Night makes a mirror of the window and makes me a spy. I sit behind her and […]
Milked
When Christine speaks of Milton, blind, composing his poem by night, and in the morning, waiting for a scribe to ‘milk’ his words, I think of the week I left you, darling – you were six months old – to fly to Kuala Lumpur, my breasts engorged for fourteen airborne hours, Simon waiting at the […]
International Workers’ Day
I was put into a rare recovery position (the shape of bog people in loose rope) My niece sings a song under her fleece He only had to peep in, to peep in, but he still couldn’t do it I hand her two lions to put in her cheeks, purple and yellow There’s too much […]
Brewery
translated by Jae Kim They say a house too old becomes human, but the old woman goes down to the basement sometimes. The place is packed with rained-on barrels; pork meat she started slicing but stopped rolls around. Is that why. The legend of a rich and bountiful basement world is sometimes like reality. The […]
Salisbury Prison, 31 December 1966
extract from My Life as Robert Gabriel Mugabe by Comrade Diogenes Junk The Settlers can give you your old life back, it is what they deal in – the past. They are experts in subverting all other action to this single cause. They are witches trading in the spells of the past. A past where […]
Tofu Synecdoche
translated by Jae Kim Where does the desert come blowing from Everyone’s lying down. Only Tobi and Cogi, they’re walking Tobi and Cogi throw up at the desert’s end Pretty but nuts. Holding Tobi and Cogi’s wrists those young ladies of sleep followed. In the hospital room and in the hallway, they make a small […]
Gardens where there’s no need for a garden
For me, it begins with a grandfather consciousness of Russia and a difficulty of surnames, smiles in a local kitchen from my alien gold neighbours and the gladness of their horses For me, it begins in the dark regions of vodka and childhood where the staircase birds share the flight of the child and a […]
The Maestro
translated by Thoraya El-Rayyes The musicians finished playing the symphony. They stood up and bowed before the eagerly clapping audience, then started collecting their instruments. Only the conductor was still troubled. Still agitated. Still tapping his baton against his hand nervously. I am not yet finished, he said to himself. I am not yet finished, […]
Notes on Various Squashes
1 I’m in the kitchen stripping courgettes for a salad. How could I not be thinking about sex, now that the basil plant on the windowsill has given up its last gasp of chlorophyll & Hounds of Love is on the record player & I bought the only two courgettes in the shop? 2 Courgettes […]
West Ride Out
And love grows angel in the gloam with your calls through resistant stars. I turn and it is fall and memory vivifies a sick man-child’s calling back in darkness to the dark, to split: the dark flashes like red ants in hot oil, but, as now, fades quickly into irises under the lids of […]
Perfect Smile
The time has arrived again to attend to my bite, now that my bark is perfected. Time to attend to my toothstones, chisels, choppers, nippers, laughing gear, my string of pearls, my wolfish incisors, molars, mashers, porcelain shelves, “a newer Sèvres pleases, old ones crack”. • Three teeth, he says, holding up three fingers. […]
Fata Morgana, 1987
for Meena Keshwar-Kamal Almond-mouth, even the crumbs in your pockets are dank with elsewhere: kulche badami, flour pale like a breast in your Amaa’s kitchen bowl, ivy masturbating its way up the masjid’s unapproachable clefts, and yes, this is how they drag you into the market filled with dogs salivating for a half-mast. How is […]
Heavy Home
“hungry eaters of a slender substance” – C. M. Doughty One thing follows another awning in the event horizon. One life in the going changes the subject. Some things made sense, others didn’t. I didn’t expect to die so soon.Well, I guess I’ll have to have tabulated myself in some way. I’d discussed writing on […]
Rangoon Lover
Your mind is to taste all nightmares. Your body in charge of fond dreams. Open your icebox, your white bra. Open the two clean lungs like you push open the shutters. Knock the drumbeats into your guts. Freeze the letters in a fridge. I only have eleven lovers. I only have poetry, this one lover. […]
The Painted Skin
Some nights I turn hetero, grooming lost ones on the streets, walking my feet to sleep. October ends. The moon is a hook. High-wind. Everyone wants some clouds to play with. A long figure emerges from a neon corner. Hello, Wind! she said, though she could have been a he, or it. Aren’t you scared […]
Roethke takes the boat to Ballinasloe
wet fingernails floated on his thick spun hands mouth corners like dried cheese curds as he clasped the wooden side of the six-thirty heaving on the waves from Bofin to Ballinasloe hands that held the black and white collar of pints sunk in Gullane’s to sink the sight of the priest who banished his Fear […]
Boxing Day
The dogs are going crazy. I think Mother slipped them some amphetamines. A truly enormous ham is being cooked and the dogs are becoming idiotic and psychotic. My ex-wife is late which is good and not so good. Mother pulsates. Welcome, ex-wife, have some ham. I watch Mother slicing slicing slicing. Two pieces of ham […]
Letter from My Father, Odysseus
After Natasha Trethewey, after E.C. Osondu Omo mi ata ta, I do not need / to remind you of years / I spent on the edge / of disappearance; the many memories / made of your uncle’s whips / are enough. Bako na ni, I do not need / to remind you of how maturity […]
Winding her
“Cornfields breathed in the darkness” – Norman MacCaig From the minute Clementine turns into the adjacent field, a-bob with its swollen thistles and rose-pink poppies standing tall among panting, caramel grass, the wind taunts her. It caresses her whisky cheeks, sets her russet hair a-tangle with its long invisible claws; snoops in the contents […]