I am Diana, moonstrider, goddess of the Hunt; The closest celestial body to Earth. I have gone by many names, Selene, Artemis, Chang’e… Wrapped in my triste grey cloak I dance to the sides of the main procession Sweeping my chariot in a lentando diminuendo to the dewy grass where I sleep forgotten in the […]

Ancient fourteen-bar meadow, please forgive how words mowed you down. How they murdered you plainchant margins of Queen Anne’s lace, your hushed lutes in hedges, in woods, and in fields that became guns, killing at a flag, learnt by rote, chanted back by cowerers afraid of death, bereft of life. To be pumped around our […]

sliced like a pear.             pips pop between the strings and frets                           and slide like incensed sand into my hair. stone-walled and mortar-bared,             black, dusty, spare, breeze-borne,                          like a rhythm running through a shadow, then ensnared. mouth closed, the breaths of agar trees               remember the strip of bark and splay […]

Every pylon we pass is the Tower and the Tower is a tram made of lightbulbs, the sea is shipping containers and the seafront is a slot machine sliding on 2ps. The pier is the glass giraffe we bought for grandma, the tide is going out between the floorboards, all the dogs are made of […]

Mother told me I had to keep my virtue safe said it was something to be kept, a shut purse. I pictured it instead as cold liquid in cupped hands, such a small well of water dripping through my fingers. Mother warned me of thirsty boys, late-night girls who idled by streams, up to their […]

After Brahms’ Requiem Den alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras though not the brittle shiftings of a parched field, those stiff yellows scorched to desiccation, but the grass that leans, restive, into crosswinds and that beckons winter sun to touch it gold. Grass like his mother praying at her sickroom window, palms against the pane, […]