This is the fortnight I ride the subway to the flat-ends of the sprawl, two hundred miles of metal. I’ve hassled to the front of car 1, hands flat against palm-warm glass. The train smashes through dark and straw people sit on local platforms staring nowhere, a jarred look they’ve been practising for years. I […]

The man I remember leaning against, places me in the middle of the sofa,    plays brown girl in the ring, tra la la la. I’m not a brown girl,    but that doesn’t matter. Delicate: being held like this,    in my father’s arms, his sashay step to the words: Plum-plum    the next play […]

A clop-clop down the lane; that’ll be Peter, and Royal on a leading-rein,    but looking up again I see no heavy horse in train,    just Peter all alone, his boots clop-clopping on their own. 

There’s the hard kind and the crumbling kind and my brother fell on the hard kind and it broke him and he lay on the driveway far too long in front of his own front door and he was alone because his wife had left him – and his children had left him and he […]

The donkey followed me to the ford. I pointed at the river’s grey colour, told him how it ran orange back in the steelworks days and the way trout and limestone turned rusty.    I showed him that, even now, you could scrape a stone and still disturb red oxide.    The donkey remained silent, […]