The bird’s chest is like glimmering gold. Frogs stand still whilst the sun beams down on their shiny skin. Autumn leaves fall from the sky. Trees bowing to the beetles below. Cat’s meow at the blinding sun. Gold is expensive, gold is bright, gold is nature.

When he asked me out on a Tuesday morning to a riverbank, I imagined being Onassis under the summer sun, tanned as a leather couch, slabbing sunscreen on my face, as I listened to the rustling waters and the humming magpies; not the smell of mud under his wellies in the car and the trudge […]

Pioneers, those men were named, driven insane by the lust for wealth. Standing, faces contorted with greed, in clammy gold-ridden streams. Heroes, you called them– if you had seen under those humid, merciless skies families trapped in their wagons by the need for riches, you might not call them so. Perhaps some were there for […]

after the illustration by Walter Crane Moth-like, he circles her: an angel incongruous on the tiger-skin rug, her beauty too richly wrought to lift. And yet he longs to lift her hand, head, or the latch of her lips – Magnificat of marigold, canticle of candelabrum – and not to fright at his reflection in […]

he tries to catch the particles in the back of the money wagon filling his gold pan with gold dust forming it into neat rows folding and scanning he lassos words debt, debit, financial concern he bows to the sovereign on one side then turns and bows to the kiwi on the other the value […]

For Imogen John Gow, ‘the Orkney Pirate’ (c. 1698-June 11, 1725) And do we not store salt in our eyelashes for this? Does dirt not constellate our heels, all for these unblinking untarnished suns– this stardust from beyond the earth’s creased edge? Why do we clench rust-dappled steel in our jaws? Why is it that […]