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 […]
Geoffrey Dearmer prize
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 […]
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 […]
Short
The whiskey in my dad’s bottle outlasts his body I should be older than this by now but the crushing simplicity of your hair but I’m being played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a movie about someone whose dad died we could rob a bank here – I say in my American voice – and he’d […]
The Half-loved
Sometimes you hear her, breathing heavily, climbing the stairs to find you in the room where the old silk wallpaper still clings to the walls. And then you feel her sighs tightening around your ribs as she rehearses her lines one more time so she can tell you exactly where you went wrong in a […]
The Word
I couldn’t tell you now what possessed me to shut summer out and stay in my room. Or at least attempt to. In bed mostly. It’s my dad, standing in the door frame not entering – but pausing to shape advice that keeps coming back. “Whatever is matter, must enjoy the life.” He pronounced this […]
Uht-Sang
Dead slumber after three days driving sullen midsummer interstates Toronto to Bellingham; a makeshift bed of sofa cushions, balled jacket for a pillow. Too tired to be nervous, facing change and a new horizon. Four a.m. A finger of chill like the cold off bare iron slipping beneath blanket and damp T-shirt; my gut yawning […]
An Idea of Order
As they have all this past month, Cars stack up along the incline Of the Brow, hood to tail to hood. Scarred by freight, broken-backed, This is the last half mile of road The workmen have left to shuck With gravel, before raking tarmac To an acrid bubbling skin. Engines idle, as ranged to the […]
Beeline
When the engineer pins the bee’s wing down to a blueprint, delves and rips into its secrets, and Faust-like trades knowledge of the light-stitched, pluck-tough surface to a City conglomerate raking it in from an underground cache of fighting machines, When the hives lie abandoned, apiarists now only landlords of rotten honeycomb, the poignant pleas […]
The Afterlife
After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves, after all. – Szymborska, The End and the Beginning And someone will have to clean up, But this is no job for ordinary Joes, Only specialists padded in moon boots, Facemasks, and white chemical suits, So someone will have to write out […]
Choirsinger
My father said, So what do you do? I stopped, and replied, I sing in the choir. Choir? said Mother, That must take some work. I said, It takes a lot, And practice. He flicked his ash Into the hearth and I tried to stand taller. It fell as small snow. My shoes were tight. […]
from the Cave Painting
Forgive the shoddy crafting – I have little time, here too the new have come, their plates of clay, their tiny tools, their zeal to show us how. Too many learn these marks that capture only sound, whose bison is two grunts, two grunts, they will not feed on that. Remember where the language lies; […]
Green Bananas
Green bananas splayed out in a basket – not a very elegant basket, though it has a, more or less, graceful handle (repaired with duct tape) arced over a curved base. Still, it could be a painting, duct tape and all, to show how life really is, to show that green bananas will lie down […]
A Bag of Tangerines
About a dozen tangerines fell out of my blue shopping bag and rolled down the bus aisle. That made them smile, though it was only a bag of tangerines rolling down the aisle. A gentleman in a white tunic handed me four at a time, the lady next to me stooped down and scooped up […]
Beloved Daughter
Beloved Daughter The crows that perch on her stone are older than she was. Their caws go over her scant twenty inches. What would she have made of this maze of graves? She would have recognised silence, rain, gently amniotic, and tiny muffled thuds. And the air would have stirred some memory of being wheeled, […]
Keith Chegwin as Fleance
The next rung up from extra and dogsbody and all the clichés are true – days waiting for enough light, learning card games, penny-ante, while fog rolls off the sea, a camera gets moisture in its gate, and Roman Polanski curses the day he chose Snowdonia. He picked you for your hair to play this […]
In the National Palace Museum, Taiwan
Here in this entrepreneurial State they work in night markets and evening school. A Ming porcelain bowl shows Dragon Gate, where a carp rises from a cobalt pool to become that creature in mist above, a symbol of strength, of the emperor, of success – a concept these people love, who fled from a communist […]
Chill
After Horace, Odes 1.XI Sweetheart, horoscopes never say: Leo. Check the tyre pressure, or you’ll plunge off the cliff road tomorrow. Cancer. It’s got you. Don’t fight it. Goodbye. Let’s just live our lives. If this is our last winter, that’s fine. Down in the bay, the sea is endlessly crashed out on pebbles. Come […]
Visitation
Strange that you should come like that, without any form at all, carrying no symbolic implements, without smile or frown or any commotion, as if you had been there all the time, like a pair of gloves left in a pocket. As if I had been looking that way, into the wide blue yonder, and […]
Tuesday At Wetherspoons
All the men have comb-overs, bellies like cakes just baked, rise to roundness. The women tilt on their chairs, laughter faked, like mugs about to fall, cheekbones sharp as sadness. When the men stand together, head for the bar like cattle, I don’t understand why a woman reaches across, unfolds his napkin, arranges his knife […]
Leaving Abyssinia
A foghorn sounds: I notice the distance between houses and the shore as the ship pulls away from a pillar: strata of limestone, clay and granite. A wall of fog drifts towards the coast; gulls peck at moss behind a stone ledge. I sit in a cabin without windows, unable to tell if I’m moving […]
from calling a spade a spade
The N Word You came back as rubber lips, pepper grains, blik you’re so black you’re blik and how the word stuck to our tongues eclipsing – or so we thought – the fear that any moment anyone might notice and we’d be deemed the wrong side of a night sky. Lately you are […]
MIG-21 Raids at Shegontola
Only this boy moves between the runes of trees on his tricycle when an eagle swoops, releases two arrows from its silver wings and melts away faster than lightning. Then a loud whistle and a bang like dry thunder. In a blink the boy sees his house roof sink. Feels his ears ripped off. The […]