has left me feeling vaguely sick and I think a walk is probably the answer, is often said to be the answer, though I now understand physical intervention must not be undertaken lightly and the appropriate training must be given because the policy is designed to prevent the impairment of health or development even […]

If you do not feed yourself, your hunger will eat you; remember to attend and your food will make itself so that you can stand back and watch how it wishes to make you. There is nothing that cannot be cured with cardamom. It will listen to the way you imagine and it will taste […]

Linh hồn [soul] 1. A voice / tapping / from inside the skin 2. Quan Âm / the goddess of compassion / at the end of her ninth life /      having shed the last stinging layer / of flesh 3. A temple full / of starving yellow birds 4. Ancestors / who stitch your […]

She chafes a flame from the lighter, listens to its gush of butane. This thirteen-year-old, hunkered down behind the PE hut. For a full minute she watches the raw egg-white heat quiver round its yolk. Then she unthumbs and the flame slims out. She tugs back her sleeve on a scar, a small pink socket […]

Instead of you dying, why don’t we go for that walk, in the woods I couldn’t find in spite of your neat, hand-written directions. You’ll pick me up, I’ll climb into your car, you’ll say Sorry it’s a mess, although it will be clean. When we arrive, I’ll say It’s so pretty here, and we’ll […]

my son lies asleep in a tin sandwich box inside the knapsack of a man deep within the Cayuga salt mine’s corridor of teeth where there’s the sound of what in my son’s dreams he takes to be our neighbour’s cough but means, in fact, they’re blasting new seams in the caverns beneath the man […]

From the bird’s head of Azerbaijan to feathered Caucasian mountains. From October 1917. From the years that followed. From the oil fields your father owned. From those fields he lost. From desert and steppe. From the place where fire jumps out of rocks. From a country which has not been a country for a very […]

Today the doctor asked if I was planning on keeping it     Right now it is a little grainy moon distorted by dark waves that I know  with the slightest change of tide might pull us closer together     Being in love is like drowning in space oh baby     you gaslight […]

The grandma’s purple leg is full of flesh- eating-maggot holes. Each morning she hammers her hip into gear, limps past the old gas furnace and makes breakfast. After the dishes are tidied away, she sits on her chair and chains her leg to it. All day long she looks out the window while her cuttings […]

 Inside was like a tunnel – a long one at that – the whole stretch of summer advanced it. We were caught in its shadows while outside the sun blazed, Mediterranean. A vacation nonetheless, this is where we wanted to be. Nowhere else existed. We made the hospital our villa, languished in the day […]

roughing each other up    in a nice way This is not the world into which I was born            so I’m changing it I’m sinking deep into the past and dressing my own mum in their blue spandexes svelte black stripes from hip to hem and husbands with better dispositions toward kindness or at least    […]

When visiting the city I take envelopes. I keep them       in the baggy pocket     of my wax jacket. When someone passes on the high street I take up a few stones from their footstep     and seal them away. Each person has their own envelope. I plan for eleven each visit, but I […]

I have eaten your house Our children were playing inside I say playing – actually your child Was ignoring my child in a meanish, unkind sort of way Anyway I have eaten them now So it is irrelevant that your child is not a kind person I ate your 4×4 too Even though I cannot […]

The rain is thick and there’s half a rainbow over the damp beach; just put your hand up my top. I’ve walked around that local museum a hundred times and I’ve decided that the tiny, stuffed dog labelled: the smallest dog in the world, is a fake. Kiss me in a pasty shop with all […]

Last summer they burnt down the thicket and everything here looks so sad. I’m sure I’ve told you the pills you prescribed flatten me and I don’t feel right. It’s now been two months since I stopped. I’ve resolved to determine how long I can hold out. I hope you don’t read this as grandiose, […]

the leaves crispy like bacon my yellow wellies all drooly because I once danced too close to the campfire poplar     poplar      oak pushpins holding the world poplar sweet chestnut Nick spots a creepy face in the bark broken t                                                                                                    r                                                                                                 e                                                                                         e up you […]

“Technology may yet show that there is something to the old catfish legends.” – Motoji Ikeya, Earthquakes and Animals: From Folk Legends to Science The catfish pulls on a trenchcoat, slides a sweet-wrapper fin through each sleeve, turns up the collar. This is the first funeral Namazu has been to since being hatched by lightning […]

Somewhere near you, a man in late middle age will be sitting on a bench with his head on fire like a safety match. On buses and trains, other men will smoulder suddenly roaring into flame from the neck up. I’d be surprised if you haven’t seen them. They would scream but, without mouths, teeth […]

Find someone who looks at you the way a drone pilot would. People who live by the railway know a house is just an assembly of stones waiting for the right train to pass so close it shakes the walls and brings the roof inside. In your life you can be loved precisely seven times […]

Right on the edge of darkness, on its very cliffs, we remember; we cry for our lost homes. Over savannahs of stone, across the fields of coal, through the long years that make an autumn night, here marching, (no nests, the sun cold, then gone), we each learnt how heaven is within one; how the […]

Like soft cheeses they bulge sideways on marble slabs, helpless, waiting to be washed. Cotton wool clings in wisps to the orderly’s tongs, its creaking purpose done… He calls the woman, ‘Missus’, an abacus of perspiration on his brow despite the cold. And she is the usual woman – two terra cotta nipples like patches […]

We can do running and throwing light and watch out for the angels of upside down and trees they fall over and the quiet is a dance without shadows between what we see and what we settle for  and the chairs that are blue to begin with. The chairs are blue to begin with and […]

after Dad spread his legs on the balcony over ten-foot waves and dripped melon and sweat on his belly and the juices dried to a hairy red ring and the pips sank in his navel like he was planting them there   and inside Mum gently lifted my clothes from the suitcase and positioned my toothbrush next to […]

Last year I turned forty but these days I find my wisdom bested by a toddling child. “Hold me upside down by my ankles,” she says, “and swing me from side to side.” And I say: “Ella, my lovely, if you had only mined the depths of fickleness in me, if you only knew how […]

Newfoundlanders had a name for it: chinsing; stuffing cracks between floorboards. They did the same with the women. Packed like sardines, they crawled into a stinking hole, freight below, deck above, two feet between sole and head.   It’s bad luck to let females up-top, so they’d fester, heads ducked to pray for rain, to rinse […]

  a Golden Shovel after Joni Mitchell   When I tell you about Steve, don’t think just because he killed someone, it   means he’s a dog to put down.  There’s always two sides and while it may well seem   that his story reeks of bug-eyed maggots, to judge him without the bullet’s story […]

November, the world dead waiting for snow & at dusk Ray coaxed his sister Susie to the one-bulb garage where   O’Connell & Ralph plus one cluster by the open tail-gate of the family Ford & on it thirteen she’s placed &   in the thick padding of her winter coat & cords squirms as […]

My father weighed a little less than at birth. I carried him in both hands to the pines as October brought the burning season. When I unscrewed the urn, bone-chaff and grit streamed out, with their gunpowder smell. I remembered the sulphur hiss of the match – how he taught me to breathe on the […]

doctor says there is something wrong with your thyroid / you are known to leak everywhere / to take the shape of whatever / wherever you are poured into / you do not contest his claim / or any other man with his hands around your throat / before the appointment / you slice a […]

Six boys, a calf’s tongue each, one task — to gulp each slick muscle down in turn, to swallow each vein whole and not give back a word, a sign, our mothers’ names. The scab stripped off, the ritual learned — five boys step out across an empty field. Five boys step out across an […]

The phones are on the basement landing near the lifts and wearing hoods like hairdryers. They feed on cash but are essential. They sleep on hooks like babies put to rest face down. They all trail cords twisted as messages. Among evidence of crisps and gum, the phones are dreaming grubby dreams graffitied on the […]

But here we are, here where the page ends, hidebound, hand-held and welled with sleep. Morning. Little left to say, so sing or let cling words like late leaves, like children. Always, eventually, the last time; all fathers someday set their daughters on their feet to never again pick them up. They flock your skin, […]

After Yves Klein In the street, I am warm past my summer skin, the pavement is burning the soles of my feet. My shadow copies me as I open my arms. When I jump, it jumps, but it doesn’t leave the ground. The light through my closed eyes tells me a secret, that I am […]

“I want a poem I can grow old in.” – Eavan Boland Maybe it was there all the time, in the room with the high ceiling and the fireplace and the mirror rimmed in gold above it, and if I went back to that house in Ireland where she took us in out of the […]

My mother said she’d never known such rage within a child, she told me later, after the doctor, and after the pastor. I don’t recall the nights within the cage. I’d raise my two-foot frame against the bars and fill the little room, my mother said, with screaming, screaming that could wake the dead, my […]

i. Affidavit A pertains a gherkin. I was cross-legged on the carpet, bordering on five-years-old, back when death was just a thing that grown-ups did, like holidays, or weddings. We ate dinner in Sudoku silence, indulging in the council- housed delight of fish and chips wrapped in the Metro, and the contents of my father’s […]

Claire wants to know what it means when everyone leaves her and what am I supposed to tell her? Even when the fuzzy-haired cello kid packs all of his posters into sleek, cardboard tubes and neatly sequesters all the grinning pictures of him and Claire into the corner of an Easy-Bake Oven box and then […]

O, Great Northern Mall, you dwindling oracle of upstate New York, your colossal lot of frost-heaved spaces so vacant I could cut straight through while blinking and keep my eyes shut, I’ve come like the flies that give up the ghost at the papered fronts of your defunct stores, through the food court where napkins, […]

for my daughter Some people stare, searching for a Judas bone, but all they can find are the stems of your arms, the sleek plunge of femur into socket. These are the usual things, and why shouldn’t they be? You were not a provision of armistice or treaty. You were not born to be nation […]

We got our hefting up here all right, the wind curling round us visibly, curing us, as if we were stones to be placed and lichen-dappled with glacial deliberation. And now, thinking with these hills, a wandering sentence can be levelled between them, tested against the mean of wilful horizon and capricious sky. Grey-brown green-black […]

Forget that old joke about timing, which I won’t rudely repeat. I learnt that timing had a world to do with weight transference between the feet, planting my front pole down, and as the ball is middled, the burden on the back foot amasses through the axis of tensed, stick-thin arms to the sweetspot in […]

For ungulates’ baby martyrs/             tiny fawns’ hayfield relief/             plained world              – llaneros:       sickle bar &     baling twine     – And for me: pined      near-topple           boughed ringed ridge in a fog that never             lifts      –           For shimmying my Old conterminous ass/      tensity narrow scarlet-cockled petals’ floor-fallen             calyces            –           and […]

1. Seven years on the beach. Two pebbles chime in his hand. One gull on the breakwater attacks something only it can see. In front of him, keen to drown him, the horizon and nothing solid between; behind, the shingle bank rising steeply, the sand exposed where he sits. He’s spoilt for symbolic intent but, […]

Tabasco was the finest cockerel in the land, loud, trigonal spurs, the fluency of his measured, laden step; a full-breasted zodiac scratching stately triumvirate markings in the sand. He had stolen a peck, a crumb of sun, he wore it, decadent, a feathered hearth, flame-orange, damask and a chilli-pepper tail. The cocked head – that […]

England blisters from me. I’ll grow a new skin in Antwerp where the declivities of the word recusant press no un-natured furrows on my back nor delve a harrow through my conscience. What shall I say, Brueghel? My vellum flays cream open to the touch of your eyeballs and lead jacketed in its precipitate white […]