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 […]
National Poetry Competition
Letter from Kermanshah
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 […]
Middle Name with Diacritics
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 […]
Reset
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 […]
Kindness
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 […]
Due to a series of ill judgements on my part
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 […]
Where Dedushka Comes From
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 […]
MOONDADDY
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 […]
Granddaughter Moves In
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 […]
Hotel Grief
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 […]
The posh mums are boxing in the square
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 […]
Do not indulge indigo
Saturday Collection Duty
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 know you only invited me in for a coffee, but
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 […]
Fucking in Cornwall
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 […]
Talisman
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, […]
Princess
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 […]
Namazu at the Physicist’s Funeral
“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 […]
Polite Safety Notice
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 […]
Near / Far Away
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 […]
Tangerines
Before the war was once-upon-a-time In 1947. I had to peer through cigarette smoke To see my parents in black and white, Lounging on zebra skins, while doormen Stood by doors in blue-grey uniforms. Nightclubs were darkened rooms, like mine, Where my parents stayed up so late It was light outside when Tony and Mike […]
A Dream of Langland
Mist over Malvern hills, a death cloud drowning in the sun, A shifting uncertain season, a truth tower toppling. Hob, harrowing his heart out, certain of nothing but hunger. A long lean man, a patched man, a godsboy dreamer, Shivering and babbling by a brook in winter, Anguish of injustice flowing from his frozen fingers, […]
In The Mortuary
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 […]
Inventions at the Asylum
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 […]
Danube 1994
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 […]
AngelBat
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 […]
Perishable Goods
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 […]
Till It’s Gone
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 […]
The Telling
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 […]
Muirburn
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 […]
The Window
after Marie Howe Once in a lifetime, you will gesture at an open window, tell the one who detests the queerness in you that dead daughters do not disappoint, free your sore knees from inching towards a kind of reprieve, declare yourself genderless as hawk or sparrow: an encumbered body let loose from its cage. You […]
Oiled Legs Have Their Own Subtext
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 […]
The Opened Field
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 […]
What Can I Say?
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 […]
Epistle from inside the Sharknado
You might call it God; might witness the weather’s disjointed volition, and figure it biblical payback for all your long decades of self-defeating industry: the gases in the atmosphere, the poison in the water. And you might stand on your lawn in your shorts, running a scream up a flagpole; sniffing catastrophe’s rank surfeit on […]
Never Say Never Say Never
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, […]
Hiroshima, 1961
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 […]
The Grey Mirror
“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 […]
The Desktop Metaphor
The Desktop Metaphor from Helmie Stil on Vimeo. there are holes in the sky and we name them we name them after things that […]
Detuned Radio
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 […]
Eleven Years of May
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 […]
The Curfew
The radicals sprung the locks that night, hurrah! and their lovely collarbones were almost moonly. Rhinos shrieked and bellowed, elephants tromboned and the animals nosed into town. Sunrise to sunrise and sunrise we kept indoors. If you can’t count your onions, what can you count my grandfather used to say. He said a lot of […]
Claire Climbs Everest
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 […]
Night Errand
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, […]
Biracial
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 […]
Long Distance Relationship with a Mountain
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 […]
Gentleman Caller
The Cavan night aspires to knives; a dog with a prominent spine is moving among the empties like a broken plough. I am alone, and the wet, electric air is humming. My boys is gone to town, to pander the black keys of a rival smile; to knead their queasy music from the local faces. This […]
St Rose of Lima’s Revenge
At a rough-backed hour, wound round with olive light, the pink-cheeked would-be anchorite slides past date palms and scarlet trumpet lilies in the colonial garden, intent on the far spinney, where wiry trees like acolytes surround a simple hut her heart always skips to reach. Holy time, before the porcelain-jowled suitors (damn them!) begin to […]
Six
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 […]
Arillus
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 […]
Six Easy Calculations
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
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 […]
Peter Philips’ Part Book Talks to Brueghel
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 […]
Cat on the Tracks
He wore the night in his fur, sat on a rung between the rails, tail wisping like smoke as a distant train split the air along its seam. Its coming headlight laid down track and placed an opal into each black seed of the cat’s eyes, every blink slow as an eclipse. Soon the white […]
Last exit to Luton
He’s a real man, you can tell, all plushy skunk and a dog you’d do well to avoid. Aaron’s twenty-three; says he could wear my moony face as a pendant, calls me tweety-bird. I hang around his neck and Aaron drives. He’s taking me out to get buzzed at a club. I’m wearing white denim, spotless as […]
After the Calm
Our furniture is turning to nails’ ends and cows’ ears. We’ve stored no provisions for molassesless times. Like used-up, riled-up hives – our hearts. Like pancakes burning in old butter – our backs. On the bus ride after the geriatrician, we smell angels powdering the breezes with lavender and sit down to dream, and lie […]
Corkscrew Hill Photo
All afternoon she counts the sounds until the fly-specked room crackles with silence. Even the song thrush noteless. A thick drizzle trickles rivulets down the window pane, smears distance on fields, curtains-off hills and greens the sagged thatch, aches in the creaking gate and screws watering eye to misting glass: a hearse skids slowly up […]
For a Liturgy
location. Not done in a flat field. Or full view of roads. To be cold. The tufted frosted clumps of winter grass to have been less regularly topped. Where spent ragwort stubbornly and bronze bracken, desiccate stalks mostly, litter and untidy. Where fallen skew old fences trail […]
The Day the Deer Came
The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world. – J.G. Ballard Ivy ran wild in the airing cupboard; it filled our cavity walls, absorbed our tap water and strangled our systems. The boiler […]
Ber Lin
Dear S – I’m sorry I didn’t make it to Beijing this year. I know I promised. The thing is, I’m in Berlin instead. ‘Berlin’, pronounced in a Chinese accent, sounds something like Beijing. You must be celebrating the mid-autumn festival. How I miss my moon cakes! The leaves are turning. Right near where I […]
Day Trippin’
I’d ride horses if they’d let me – Will Oldham We talked all morning about the horse that, if we’re honest, none of us actually knew existed but it seemed worth it just to get you into the car, to stop shouting. We mentioned it so often you began to repeat it from your […]
The Crab Man
Turn left, close the gate Enter Mariner’s Lane. The road to the shore Is all salt and tar. Go right down to Correction House Bank. Smell the fish guts, Feel it pull you. Push Gossip’s voice Far from your mind. Ignore the shudder Of trains, overhead. Down Tanner’s Bank Pick your way. Head held high, […]
Enough Sky
Not getting enough sky now that it’s pindrop dusk and Venus flirts with a slabby moon Spalls of silver flush livid – I cannot flank desire and all this reaching for what must be, this needing to cultivate the verge, always it must be as lewd as breathing, must be looking for this and […]
A Shrunken Head
He’s been stitched-up; two gummed, black-threaded eyes Squint back across the decades in surprise Through spiteful chinks of sunlight, acrid smoke, Screwed-up against some wicked tribal joke. His rictus has been sewn into a smile, A tight-lipped dandy, puckered into style, The clearing where his grisly fame began Still broods beneath the kinks of wood-stained […]
Night Feed
We stand at the door and watch the pale night, you, my twelve pounds of grackle bird, seagull boy, oblivious to the moonlight and what lies beyond – the foxes silently slipping through fences, robbers waiting in their cars for a gap in their nerves. A helicopter rides overhead, restless and searching. It’s all right […]
Documentary Evidence
(note: a quarrel is an old name for a diamond-shaped pane of glass used in making lattice windows) I love to think of them standing on a bench outside the Angel, Walter Bogan, John Tucker, 8 in the evening Nicholas Gay, William Amyott, a candle on the table, Edward Rounsevall, taking turns to stand on […]
Ray Charles Visits Suite 1, Radiotherapy Department, Christies Hospital, Manchester, England
Looking at the ceiling day after day? the Siemen’s air-conditioning vent, protruding speakers, lights, the sound proof panels, she tolerated the radio’s monotonousness until today when, out of the blue, Ray Charles dropped into the room with ‘What’d I Say?’ and she followed his every word, each bluesy chord, the entire pulse of him wondering […]
Powerpoint
I have circled the planet. Above the tawny land of my ancestors, the Arc of the Covenant on its holy mountain, I saw the inside of a cotton bag yanked down over my head; at my wrists and ankles percussion of steel, blood and the links’ negation. Oh my grandfather in the Emperor’s palaces! […]
My Year of Culture After Kathleen Ossip
We’re walking home late from the theatre, my lover and I. She’s wearing pearls and a linen trouser- suit ? it was a ‘well-made’ play. Sweetheart, I say, the writer drank snake blood for inspiration. She flicks her tongue. We’re lying in bed reading the supplements, my lover and I. I’m wearing yellow socks; […]
Much After ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ Act II, Scene 3
I heard a shout from my master’s orchard. Boy! a man called. He did not know my name. Not my master ? a guest called Benedick. I ran to him. I said, Signior? I watched and waited. In the window of my chamber lies, he said, a book. Go fetch it quick to me here […]
Reflection, July 1938
All day and night you tread water in a well, hear soldiers shooting, burying groaning bodies on the mountain. When the bucket rattles down, you dive. Near dawn an exhausted conscript shines a torch. He’s drunk. Hello, he calls in posh Moscow Russian. Hello, you mouth. Disappointed there’s no echo, he frowns, shakes his […]
Missing
First, Charlie Chaplin as a runner bean ? there are seven of him. You can’t tell which bean he is. They all have hats and turned-up shoes, wear tight jackets that are pulling, wrinkled slightly. These look-alikes don’t make the catalogue ? maybe Charles Jones who photographed, arranged them side by side, had never seen […]
Body Sonnets VIII: The Magdalen
Cresting the gradual stairs in the Museo Del Duomo, you come to the Magdalena, who is nearly a river of hair. Here clothes, if they be clothes, Donatello has ragged to tresses that leave her only more bare ? snaking the bight of her thigh’s line, giving rib into hip ? in their tumbling watery […]
Coming Down to Drink
What beasts are these coming down to drink at the shallow pools in the river bed? The drought has drawn them out. And now the herdsmen; two, three. One squats; the others stand leaning on their spears. They do not watch the herd. Their eyes rest in space. A breeze rises, stirs the grass […]
Flat Dad
I’d taken out the bones so that he settled easily, dropping into a lazy S, unless draped -as now- across a bench, or hung – yesterday – from a branch. Wherever I choose to rest and release the weight of him, I am careful to keep intact the parted tuft of soft white hair. I […]
Encore, Mr Fox!
monsoon oolong spoon … Reynard lies along the garden wall smoking. ‘I thought you were a cat,’ I say. Reynard takes off his i-Pod, sits up, arranges his brush: ‘Sorry, would you like one?’ And he takes out an egg-shaped case and opens it. It’s full of feathers and chicken skin twisted into the shape […]
The Hairdresser from Beirut
He’s been here two years. I wonder if the others ask as I do not, why he left, or of all places, why he chose our well-meaning suburb. We sit before his mirrors, him behind, or to one side. He’s still young, and slim with a little belly. His hair curls where it will. I […]
Embrace
Unshowered, wrestling with the sea still on our skin when she catches me, mid-room, with a kiss. Not a passing glance of lips, but her intended till I press back against the wall laughing, in a body-search pose as ready as her to forget about dinner. Once, in our first months, we headed down […]
New Fruit
In the last knockings of the evening sun Eve drinks Calvados. Elsewhere in her life She has played muse and mistress, bitch and wife. Now all that gunpoint gamesmanship is done. She loves the garden at this time of day. Raising her third glass up to God, she grins; If this is her come-uppance for […]
Then in the twentieth century
Then in the twentieth century they invented transparent adhesive tape, the first record played on Radio 1 was Flowers In The Rain by the Move, and whereas ink had previously been in pots, now it was in cartridges. They killed each other a lot and found ingenious and crafty ways to do it, sometimes one […]
The Lazy Maid
chin snug in her palm, her elbow plugged firmly in the knobbly joint of her kneecap, legs a little ajar beneath her skirts, is sound asleep upon the stool, dreaming of her mother teaching her how to scrape parsnips, which is how at 11.10pm the mistress of the house discovers her, stares at her a […]
Bud Fields and His World
i.m. James Agee What are you going to tell us, Bud; about the days that keep coming and rain and wind and the sour smell of shacks and empty fields and the silence of women? How do you look your children in the eye and what stories can there possibly be to hide the intimidation, […]
From Professor Nobu Kitagawa’s Notebooks On Effects of Lightning on the Human Body (Tr. from the Japanese by N. Kitagawa)
89. Incident on the Horikiko Coast (30/07/78) Young couple alone, he recumbent on red rock near pinnacle of sand-hill pocketed with grass, she by his feet, sky making threat of raindrops though earth remaindered dry. Mid-afternoon, adjacent to sun’s zenith, she touching ground at plural potions of her body, while lightning conflaged cracked dead-bush 6m […]
ju ju baby
John Canoe you come with me I show how danger fly like upside down bird like woman jumping from high perch where she no right to be into your crumpled bed John Canoe she not for you she marble and stone when moon shine in churchyard she darkness and witchwoman and you going […]
Dole Queue
Tom Paine at one time made ladies’ corsets. And why not? I too had a job once, I remember, on an assembly line. Seems a long time ago. Every fucking Monday I stand here , grow grey-faced, slack; I slouch. What do I care about the law, […]
The Flitting
You wouldn’t believe all this house has cost me- In body language terms, it has turned me upside down. I’ve been carried from one structure to the other On a chair of human arms, and liked the feel Of being weightless, that fraternity of clothes Now my own life hits me in the throat, the […]
Timer
Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough to make you ashes in a standard urn. An envelope of course official buff contains your wedding ring that wouldn’t burn. Dad told me I’d to tell at St. James’s the ring should go in the incinerator. That “eternity” inscribed with both their names is his surety […]
Fantasy of an African Boy
Such a peculiar lot we are, we people without money, in daylong yearlong sunlight, knowing money is somewhere, somewhere. Everybody says it’s big bigger brain bother now, money. Such millions and millions of us don’t manage at all without it, like war going on. And we can’t eat it. Yet without it our […]
Whoever She Was
They see me always as a flickering figure on a shilling screen. Not real. My hands, still wet, sprout wooden pegs. I smell the apples burning as I hang the washing out. Mummy, say the little voices of the ghosts of children on the telephone. Mummy A row of paper dollies, clean wounds or […]
The Death of Richard Beattie-Seaman in Belgian Grand Prix, 1939
Trapped in the wreckage by his broken arm he watched the flames flower from the front end. So much pain- Holy Jesus, let them get to me– so much pain he heard his screams like music when he closed his eyes- the school organ at Rugby Matins with light slanting down hot and heady from […]
Between the Lines
Words were dust-sheets, blinds. People dying randomly, “for want of breath” shadowed my bed-times. babies happened; adults buried questions under bushes. Nouns would have been too robust for body-parts; they were curt, homeless prepositions- “inside” “down here”, “behind”, “below”. No word for what went on in darkness, overheard. Underground, straining for language that […]
The Widow’s Dream
Downstairs, she feels a sudden shift of air. Rustling the fresh paper, he lets it rest; Its great slack sheets enfold his lap like sails, Near the steaming kettle, the loaf of bread, The draining-board. He’s like an architect With plans, his mouth a straight line holding breath, He’s concentratedly construing clues. She wrestles sheets […]
A World Elsewhere
1 The Visit There were barns, paddocks, young fruit trees coquetting in the rain and thrum of wind. It blew so hard the awning of the outside love-seat split a little further every hour. Tall dogs with silky hair slipped moorings by the Aga gliding up to my strange scent; the squash-faced semi-precious cat subsided […]
Room Service
We have no stretcher cases here, nor sirens, shrieking emergency and blood. Infirmity arrives sedately, wearing no bandages, for the bleeding stopped long ago. Now there is only scar-tissue, the site of ancient battle-grounds whose origins no-one remembers. There are no visible fractures and we have not the technology to mend the cracks that widen […]
Protestant Windows
They come at sunset peddling daylight, two Salesmen wearing glasses, through which they view His shabby sliding sashes with disdain. “Wood?” they suppose and feign Dismay. “Yes, comes from trees,” And he raises the drawbridge ten degrees, A hurdle to reservists But child’s play to front line evangelists With news of paradise On earth (at […]
The Silkies
Someone last autumn put the evil eye on Mrs Kendrick for hanging bright crimson knickers on the line in sight of where the boats come in, and as the word got around the island still the knickers flew there, and they flew through last week’s luminous storms and through the lovely day we had on […]
undressing
Like slipping stitches or unmaking a bed or rain from tiles, they come tumbling off: green dress, pale stockings, loose silk – like mown grass or blown roses, subsiding in little heaps and holding for a while a faint perfume – soap, warm skin – linking these soft replicas of self. And why stop […]
Homeland
them come at midnight i remember that i was fooding the cat what happened to the cat in and across the hall them was before the last bod slam the door i was scared more for décor all bootmark in the twill mud set to stone too quick in nape and alley and fuss would […]
The Third Wife
My first wife knew no more than me, no telling where her needs ended, mine began. One day though I turned the hill to find the boat moored in the field, the house out in the bay, adrift, door open wide. I rowed out to a message on the mat: gone to my cousin’s place […]