stanza poetry competition
Yellowhammer
All other birds are silent when the football season meets the Sunday morning summer. A lone cow descants to raucous shouts, the herd loll in a dappled circle. Halftime. You perch upon the hawthorn hedge, head bouncing sunshine. A little bit of bread and no cheese. You deserve more— bring out the Stilton, ruffle your […]
The Skylark and I
The skylark and I have traded places, I reel and churr all day and she’s great with paperwork, a natural shredder. It was difficult, at first to master a voice that pulses so close to the heart, where each lung draws its song independent from the other, holding air and refrain in the same breath, […]
I Hear You Singing
When I first heard you sing, my heart turned over, not knowing, then, how long I’d be your lover, nor what sense it made to speak of forever. But here you are today: wife, mother, grandmother. Fortune, hard work and love held us together. I hear you singing, and my heart turns over.
De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da
Stook griiind, stook griiind: the pulse extends waves to thrust air down her throat into wizened lungs. Her brain sucks oxygen for its miserly self storing it for her last memory of Shang-A-Lang. It robs muscle so she is still, it thieves liver so she pees brown, it purloins kidneys so toxins thrive. Her mobile […]
Bubble
I can’t remember a time there wasn’t the constant plop, plop from the demijohns fermenting against the far wall. Or the TV so loud – even louder when the ads come on – hammering Mrs Hall’s ears till her hearing-aids screech; fingernails on a blackboard, and Mr Hall eating his packet of cheese and onion […]
Hear her life
The beap The scream The beep The heat The heart The drip The breath The beat The air The hour The light The blue The line The pause –
Reliquary
I cannot keep you, but I can carve you a wooden box, engrave it with your name; I will not smother it in gold, cobalt blue enamel, set it with rubies, pearls; I’ll make an aperture of rock crystal to let the light in. Inside this box, I’ll place no giant knuckle bone, no vial […]
Airlocks
The tundish is a trickling lantern valve once ignored, now a vital sign as a city of pipes holds its breath, air stacks compressing as water expands to fill the cylinder tower. One lock releases, another blocks. Aim your phone at the hidden underside and answers appear in the camera flash etched on silver labels, […]
Blueprints for a future self
Your voiceover delivers instructions for the correct use of industrial-sized 3-D printers, one last record of your speaking aloud. We picture a white-coated technician watching your coded animations jolt to the tempo as you explain how to smooth the flow of layers shaping liquid into solid form, how inside these glass walls hours of programming […]
The First Bird of Dyslexia
Morning has Broken, said the hymn like the first morning; and (for me) was unreadable even when pounded out with heavy hammers mor- / -ning / has / bro- / -ken Teacher would perform the trick of lifting a sound and a sherbet lemon from a high shelf – mor, he would say – cracking […]
The Danger is
I can’t hear them coming up behind me whether a vehicle or bicycle without a bell. If I tried to turn or look over my shoulder I’d tumble to tarmac or cobble so I keep going yard by yard until I can side-step out of the way, let them pass. The danger is they may […]
Confession
I remember how sunny the day was pretending to be, how bright it was in the kitchen how the water I was pouring from the blue mug to the red mug, to the blue mug, to the red mug was whispering it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright how it dragged my sleeves how the conversation […]
Blakeney, moonlight
When the timpani, when the violins, mine is one body among many prone in the gallery. Still as seals on a wet beach in moonlight, waves of sound lap at the exposed summer night. We enter the music as we enter a sea, wishing to be transformed in some small, elemental way, eyes-closed-drifting through all […]
They Came From Somewhere Else
The Mask
i.m. Major Brodie ***, MC, DSO, 1882 – 1923 You must have discovered it early. Perhaps you felt your heart unfold, your breath quicken, when the men stripped off their shirts at harvest, and guilt was a sudden aftertaste. You put the mask on, like we all did, fearing the truth of nakedness. You learnt […]
Sloes
We’ve left sloe-picking late. Now white yeast clouds the surface of their bruised moons. I wasn’t there when she needed me; a difficult birth, that led her to the edge. And now she rolls her eyes as my clumsy hands knock and scatter sloes onto the grass, and when we have filled each stale box […]
On Draining the St Martin Canal
I had thought that I preferred its placid waters that trade a Lethe forgetfulness for our reflections in soft focus, encourage a belief in the metaphysical, a fantasy of fish dancing beneath sun-speckled mirrorballs to the Gauloises wheeze of an accordion; but when they drained the St Martin Canal, what they found, along with the […]
The second lie
Start by telling them about that night I was lost, adrift, a skinny ghost tripping through Shinjuku’s dirty streets, hob-nobbing with yakuza, dizzy on shochu, face shiny in the city’s thick wet heat. Or that morning my legs dangled free from the helicopter door, Vietnam’s canopy flattening like moss beneath my feet; cold hands toying […]
On reading Professor McGrath
‘We must be prepared to be surprised at those whom we meet in the kingdom of God.’* They made him smile at first, those hope-laced words which appear to dent predestination, intoxicant as gaudy hummingbirds in hovered flight. McGrath’s bold suggestion hints salvation might be for one and all, not the preserve of a self-selecting […]
Being Swedish in Pontlottyn Rugby Club
Word goes around: Maria’s friend is Swedish. Boys in stripy tops line up across the dance floor curious to know if my life is all sex and cigarettes. They tie themselves in knots to get close to me. I make space between my lips to let out the nonsense of pretend Swedish. I tell them […]
The Dub Artist
I’ve been learning about dub-engineers and the tricks they play: marrying up their own footsteps to the character’s gait; slamming the studio door at just the right moment; rustling leaves in synchronicity with the screen. They replace those little things lost beneath dialogue or tense music or laughter. Some things don’t sound like themselves, and […]
Sp/lit
Whitewash
Cyprien told me in confidence, and I promised his secret was safe. I remember the bar, the tarnished walls, the termites sucking the whitewash, their exuberant, tenacious persistence upturning the earth underneath. We were sucking Fanta through straws. He was the one neighbour I knew didn’t drink. He leaned forward to utter the words. I […]
Home County
There is a village coiled in the Chilterns, all catflaps and thatch, black beams and whitewash, cradled in hills and cosseted by trees where bellringers reel out handstroke and backstroke the way the red kites loop the sky while we walk the dog or jog round the park. But stay awhile and it’s not so […]
When Ursula Tyrwhitt was Gladstone’s Lover
Dear Gwen, Today’s vase holds mustard-yellow chrysanthemums, yesterday’s were rainbow-paper anemones. This evening we spoke about the economy, I hold our balance in orchid asymmetry. His hands, after a day deep in stately missions, turn our passion, the blue-deep of delphiniums. He scribes such love scenes I’m losing my faculties, his ink, tattooed on my […]
The Journey Home
An oak leaf took flight with his petiole up, lobes swilling the fresh air, arms wide open. A gentle wind drove him through the country, made him fall in love with firs, beeches, maples. They too, belong to one home, they too, fall down on their own. No shapes, no colours can outwit the time. […]
To Kill a Spider
apologise first to reduce the chance of bad luck catch its eye make sure it has heard you know that if you kill a spider you risk losing money and that the cobwebs in the house are a sign of good luck know that your mother was misguided or just plain wrong that a spider […]
To bring me luck
I stop the bridal carriage at an old people’s home pick out the wisest, oldest woman pretend that she’s my mother wear her like a new stole. Lent an abundance of thoughts and warnings I borrow it all, tucking wisdom and foolishness under my mother, draped comfortably around me. She discards everything but knowledge and […]
Folklore from 35,000 Feet
In Greenland most of which is white in winter, and crazed with ice blue in summer, people build towers on floating foundations and lie on top counting jets flying over. They like to watch jet farts criss-crossing, dissipating in the winds. Greenlanders do not wear green. They have an aversion to verdure. For them it […]
North of all countries
and for tradition, he walks on rainfall the density of stone, archetypal bear, no fur-lined pocket to conceal his claws, sapphires or believable treasure maps. Spiraling raptors search for more prey, flying past uneaten clouds and windmills. Seeing for miles, unhampered by the boy, the shabby leather of ruby-studded jessies. One place you find a […]
Let’s Burn the Lot
Let’s get in the habit of burning all the clothes we’ve worn whenever we had bad luck or got grim news. Your trousers would go up very quickly, a man-made mix we’d suppose. My long black redundancy coat, moth holes and hopefully a few still-nibbling moths, could meet their ravaging match on that cleansing pyre. […]
Appleland
Here the county lies in an old skin shedding hops, apples, sweetened air blowing blossom and spores, the scents of earth turned from season to season. In the county archives maps unroll their old boundaries, parish by parish tithe by tithe, where orchards are named in hundreds for the conservator to explore inch by inch. […]
against a wolf at the door
Summer’s end you traipse Red Riding Hood style into the wood, off the path to be bloodied and purpled picking blackberries. Child of the Grandmothers Sugar Roll & Preserving Pan Collective. It is in your DNA to weave hand and arm through aggressive laces of briar. Your fingers pluck a season of weather encoded in […]
Trawlermen
“I had a white ‘un once: there were that many pockets I could never find my loose change.” Hull trawlerman Three weeks at sea then seventy-two hours for the ‘three-day millionaires’ to put on their suits (sewn to order by a Hessle Road tailor – a jacket in sky blue with belt or double-breasted […]
The Cake Mixture
After Edip Cansever a woman searching for emptiness of being creams butter and sugar in a mixing bowl one, two, three yolks and a tiny piece of shell she leaves the shell a moth enters the room she adds the coldness of milk and evening air echoes of mothers calling their children the darkness […]
Landfall at daybreak
Fetch a saucepan – the small even-handed one with a lip on either side, find the flat wooden stirrer, or better still, use the spurtle Granddad made, take the rolled oats from the cupboard – the nearest stout paper packet – marvel at the pale yellow elephant on the front, outlined in bright blue, look […]
A Traditional Cure
To hold her down, that mother’s tongue, you need an iron plate to stop her scolding – a man-made tongue rigid and silent in its strength. Language can be tamed and tongues be taught. All she can do is dribble now, around that held-firm tongue and utter baby sounds – no scolding words. Her head […]
The Door
You drew the line, built a wall along it. The only door is camouflaged, locked from your side. You keep the key in the pocket of your black suit. The wall curves. When I walk its length it meets itself, becomes a circle. You are inside wanting nothing of me. But sometimes you unlock the […]
Reportage, Grenfell Tower
Printed and broadcast UK media June 2017
On and Off the Wall
Though the death world claws at everything it will not touch her (Callimachus, active 432-408 BC) It might have been a drowsy summer afternoon near Alexandria; the click and buzz of cicadas, the hum and tumble of bees sated with rosemary and thyme, balancing on cistus stars. He might have sheltered under a Mediterranean oak, […]
Gated Community
I’ll choose a boggy piece of ground with mosses and with sedge and build a dry stone wall around, or lay a hazel hedge, and on one side a five-barred gate to let the breezes through; on either hand the gateposts straight, a blackthorn and a yew. The other fields in use there are green […]
The Walls Between Us
The Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, expert, maybe, on Ethics (what we owe one another), hears through the open kitchen window a hubbub she cannot fathom. It comes from over the high wall that separates her from the neighbours. Shouts and cackles in unfamiliar voices mingle with the breaking of glass, the clang on metal. The […]
Walls
An ice cream, an oblong of vanilla from the café on the clifftop in the gull-squawking, salty gale. You unwrap the waxy paper in silence, and I tongue-press the ice cream into its angular cone, choose my words carefully, roll them round in my head then say the wrong thing, say nothing, the rain sheeting […]
Letting Her Go
I am the pigeon on the red roof, next to the lead coloured cupola of the mosque, beside the off-white wall of shadows in Sarajevo. I am the woman in the hotel room watching the pigeon on the red roof of the shrill café, next to the matted lead-grey of the cupola of the mosque, […]
Cavafy’s Barbarians
What’s going to happen to us now without the barbarians? For us, they were a solution of sorts. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians (1904) Reports from the borders are wrong; the barbarians are crossing them daily. What can we do to stop them? […]
Winds of Change
I set about my eco house with gusto. A rising helix of straw bales beneath five oscillating wind sails. Ingenious. My sister was more gung-ho when she got the bug. A rustic chalet with log walls. Deep in the woods. Snug. He had to go one better. Big bro. With his massive redbrick […]
The far wall
Before anybody passes on, they come to play bowls in their cardigans, flat shoes and flannels, free of the day-room in the old folks’ home where they can’t twist the lid off or pump coffee out of the urn any more. Their eyes are out at first, but by practice they become accurate, able to […]
Toy Town
They had nailed him to the wall, palms first his plastic feet cracked under hammers, just out of reach, still wearing combat pants with a crew cut and a scar on his cheek. A day later he was joined by a bearded one in khaki, also pinned the way of the cross. Naturally, everyone was […]
The Penance of St Stephen
Patron Saint of Bricklayers We spent a fortnight in the glowering sun, laying courses till the job was done, as were we. You the bricks and I the mortar, we’d build rows, our English Bond secured in the soft strength of clay, the blood stirred like a paste to bind the sand and water. If […]
Dr Mirabilis and the Brass Wall That Will Save England
“How,” she muses, “do we keep them out?” “Mirabilis will know,” pipes up the fool, a mop-head jokester swamped in crumpled clothes, “he’s as wizardly in truth as in trickery.” “Go fetch,” she charges, crossing leathered legs. Forth he bumbles, north to distant shires, home to freckled Vikings and offspring of the Commonwealth, finds the […]
The Contract
They came one night in February from the quarry in the valley with blocks of fog loaded on their carts. The moon rose and the Bear ploughed the dark. The ground was bright with blades of frost. Each footprint they made was a black bite. All night they carved elaborate shapes to fit round trees […]
Performance
John Cage, 4’33” (1952) He would staple a piano string to a cloud in his empire of structured air – composer of play nothing, suspend everything – the big unsung serenade of O unravels. What do you hear? Fricative chip of a cough, metallic snap stage left, wet streets ribboned by tyre treads. Breaths in […]
Towards Silence
Even if no decipherable word escapes my lips and the whiffle of my breath is all I hear – then a mouse behind the wainscot buffs its claws on plaster dust. Wasps buzz their way in and out of a gap they’ve found/chewed between the soffits and the wall, busy building beauty no-one else can […]
The Sunday Night Commute from Bucharest to London
The airport security queue moves efficiently as burly men swiftly remove their coats, belts, watches, shoes; routine as a morning shave. They hunch in silent groups at the gate not hung-over like returning stags but gathering themselves for another wifeless week closing the part of their minds where children bounce and chatter where mothers pray […]
Coffee Ring
I saw it on her desk, a blurry swirl of darker brown exactly where I went to place my mug, a forearm from the edge, beside the letters labelled ‘to be burnt’. What seemed a complete circle silhouette was actually the endless sum combined of smaller partial coffee rings, offset, and fading logarithmically with time. […]
Bringing Home the Cows
He walked there and back morning and evening across the Long Field and the Loughane road to the pond. He drove the cows before him with a flick of a blackthorn stick. He always had a Rex with him. She remembered at least six. She’d follow like an altar girl, reverent, in procession. […]
A Conversation in Fingers between Sisters
Girl siblings have long since spoken in fingers from the first bash of child hands by accident to the deliberate thread of digits in family stance. Hold your sister’s hand, they learn. Then unlearn quick, from ever riskier heights, how to drop the hand that is left in […]
No News
(Paul McGrane writes asking if we have any news for the Stanza newsletter) There is no news. The pens try hard to write But can’t, still bickering with reluctant ink. The pencils sulk, all spoiling for a fight And point out that they can’t know what to think. The keyboards are depressed, their functions blurred, […]
Solo
We touch his silence – hand, hair – amid the pulse and sigh of machines like the silence kept after compline: a flame carried out into night but later I think of a cellist poised at the brink of a solo – how he cups our hush for one last moment before he begins.
Silence
snatches its moment between the orchestra’s last flourish and the roar of applause, is captured in the abstract on the far wall made up of squares in different shades of white. It hangs, swaying, between the judge’s question and the jury’s answer, creeps in holding its breath when the baby, finally, falls asleep. It lasts […]
Elective Mute
Inside her head she’s eloquent, knows all the answers, words that tumble out in perfect clause and cadence, words like clause and cadence, beautifully enunciated to herself, alone. Like stories she makes up, hobgoblin tales where small girls answer riddles, save lives of princes tied to trees, win golden treasure kept in chests and coffers, […]
Batting Partnership: 34 Not Out
I’m wearing ear-plugs on my sun-lounger because the test match is blaring from your laptop while I’m trying to read poetry, and both of us insist on our right to the garden because at last it’s summer, and though you’d be happy to wear head-phones if I asked, I’d still have to listen to your […]
7 Pregnant Silences
Listen hard .. clocks tick, nibs scratch on paper, minds whirr. Ten minutes left – finish off quick! * Summit of Catbells, January snow; your arm round my shoulder, our eyes reflect a shelf of mist trapped far below. * Father’s bedside, D4 East. Soft kiss on his cheek now […]
A Closeness
Because I’ve been dreaming of the carp I caught (asleep at this late hour with its eyes open, dreaming also perhaps in its muddied way of an episode – a forgotten feeding trauma), I feel ashamed. That fish’s misted gaze was at the core of it. I woke when I started to fill with water […]
Without darkness – no stars
From light into darkness she climbs the stairs arrives, like Concorde on the edge of space What is she thinking let me guess Where is she taking us we couldn’t care less Shall we take sandwiches maybe, yes.
Dusk
She’s started to avoid mirrors again. They make other people’s faces seem bigger than they should be and sometimes much nearer. Perhaps ‘mirror’ is really another word for the idea of night as if the glass, like a leaf, might curl and drop, leaving only a frame where the day was. There would be a […]
The Middle Watch
The phone sounds at four am: five rings, no message. The apartment is borrowed so it’s not my business but I’m awake now. What level of urgency or mischief makes someone at this hour call and not wait? It’s darker than it ever gets in town. Do they hear my breathing? I uncover an ear […]
There are no horses
only stations and the rails uncoiled between them like a leviathan’s tentacles slithering past your ankles through dimly lit city streets. Are there storefronts, houses, cars beyond these circles of light? All that can be […]
In The Very Dark
In the very dark of the night it rained, a fall of sudden and surprising rain sounding like the sea or snap of sheets shaken out for the line. I lay and listened to its roar, now sheet, now ocean roar, with a dream of mirrors spooling in my head, flickering the way home movies […]
For Subway Graffiti
Marking the dark, electric identity voices that trespass from aerosol cans Marking the dark, a human hand dancing on dangerous pages of tunnels and trains Marking the dark, out from the margins scratching grey light with a jitterbug wave Marking the dark with neon-flecked taglines cool cursive threads leading out of the cave
The Patient Ghost
Before I was a woman – I don’t mean physically, I mean consciously, in my mind – before that, I wrote a poem or two. They were political poems; that was my stance. As to where I was standing, I couldn’t have said. I went through that consciousness-raising, that debate about the fate of women, […]
The Inquisition of St Giles
Patron Saint of Noctiphobics “You think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it” from ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ How did you know that you were born? All I did was drip like wax from one womb to another. Where have you been all this time? Without light the […]
Winter Solstice
I will not write about Christmas lights garlanding the tree, how steadily red blends to sapphire emerald gold, how strong the little bulbs must be to throw their dancing hearts upon the café wall, how children try to catch them. I will not say there is tinsel draped about the branches like seaweed over pebbles, […]
The best chairs
Tugged out of true until the stitches burst, the chairs we kept for pub talk: the Blair wars, our young friends debunking freedom’s many enemies that plonked themselves in every argument. What thoughts we had in armchairs in the night. We wriggled till the horsehair came adrift, a fire risk no-one had the heart to […]
Night time in the Village
Three small rectangles of light delineate my neighbour’s house. A crescent moon hangs thin above the wood, its sculpted, slender curve swerved into points. Everything else is gone so deeply black: starless, obscured, secret. The bricks have melted; the roofs have quietly collapsed. Each night like this without street lights most things are possible: like […]
There is beauty in stripes
I am thankful for striped things – For rainbow socks and banded jeans; For tiger cushions and zebra-print bags; The intonation of light and dark; For clouds that filter sun-rays onto mountains; For never missing a chance to be on telly. Stripes can be taken From a pocket, reached for […]
Adjustment
Come the apocalypse and days of cellars filled with the very worst kinds of meat, you and I, with our scant supply of practical skills will have to rely on these healing hands of yours. Oh I know you’re bored, but place them again over my aching spine, feel the discs shift and […]
The Mound
We believed the concrete mound, round and firm as a mother’s breast, had been put there just for us. The slide was our anchor: the base of its ladder buried deep in concrete. We ran around it like mad things, went up and over, up and over or poured ourselves into the mouth of the […]
At Blackwater Tavern or ‘Lucky Polly’s twenty-two be damned!’
New Year’s Eve – driving along the minor roads of a mountaineous south-west Kerry peninsula, we’d yelled – Next pub! and a toothless giant appeared peaked with cap, to direct us deftly – You’ll be grand there – through the hedge gap to a field full of deserted tractors beside the hostelry, thronged inside […]
September
This is unknown; my bright, berry blood comes late, follows a new calendar. Soon, I’ll say goodbye to this belching red, this faint anaemia, goodbye to the children I never wanted. Last night, walking back from the village, I saw them in the waning moon, holding hands, running away from me.
Humanities
A frog is always a frog, a moth is a moth, swallows flying in their own manoeuvre. Watch how it works. Insects in and out of these garden petals as Mum talks about my birthday and how 1966 was the year they stopped giving any girl – Mum’s own name, Myra. Only people can break, […]
Playground
There was no grass. Alright, just one small rectangle contained by a wall five bricks high. It was so green it shone, absurd as a garden pond in the outback. It was forbidden. When Bobby Braddock leapt over and sprinted circles whooping in grey shorts he was returned from Sir to class with a face […]
Unregulated
It happened quietly. Even the door he went through each evening was understated. Beneath it, a ruler of bluish light measured its width. Mostly nothing was heard. Perhaps the occasional click. Once a voice, well modulated, said, “This is obligatory.” Then silence. Was it him speaking or someone else? From outside, no other voice was […]
Under the Carob, Tired and Hallucinating
We drowse in our sojourn beneath the rattling carob – there goes Miss Death Knickers, Mister Pulchritude, the Teeth twins and the Fat Man’s moll. We remain silent. Our smells mingle, we are in default ‘wait’ mode and it’s waiting that sludges our blood. There’s the couple from Morden, (that we’ve renamed Mordor) and there’s […]
The Washhouse at Relleu
It wasn’t that I minded the cold kisses of the frogs as they slipped down my nightdress, but the fact they couldn’t or wouldn’t rescue me. None had the clear sight to see me for who I was but, whipped by the branches that coiled inside the wash house, they spun frowning, glassy-eyed, into the […]
Gap Year Letter from a Five-Toed Sloth
Hi, Mum, I’m sorry that I missed the plane. How far is Heathrow, then, from John O’Groats? When next you come to meet me, take a train. I came here to observe the two-toed sloths. I gave that up. The species is extinct. (Since sloths could not be bothered using both, they’ve all […]
After Hours
Think of me as the drowned village, my people safe – the fiddler, and the midwife. No old man taps his cane down the street, no woman runs out to her neighbour. Jugglers and acrobats pass me by. I have no lilacs, nor goats, nor fields of wheat. Just water, like the sound of […]
Jabez Few’s Six White Mice
At ease in the Three Tuns with a lunchtime pint and sustenance, Jabez Few; his six white mice arsling about from pocket to pocket, popping up for a knag upon the shove of wheat laid up upon the bar. Some older villagers referred to them as his familiars. Not aloud and only when fixed in […]
My Perfect Father
held my mum’s hand for the three days I took to be born, worked nights so she could sleep between feeds, soaped me with Johnson’s Baby Bath alongside two floating books of ABC, taught me to spell playing Scrabble, offered a pink Smartie if I got the letters right and yellow when they were wrong, […]
Pinochet’s Garden
Punctured gasps of bog cotton in the marsh by the stream only he knew the way through. He liked his knowledge. He had the gardeners dowse selected plants on the hour, every hour, calibrating which were the last to droop. He admired cacti for their instinct, their endurance, liked the sweat of his greenhouse, the […]
Afterlife
The marshes have filled themselves with wetness and bird song since they were left alone. The Basran reed warbler breeds deep in Mesopotamian banks, the original garden of Eden. Each dusk, birds with dark eyestripes flash amber shadows low over lakes and gleaming mud. So many species are flourishing, the African darter, the sacred ibis […]
Eternal Plane
London, 24 July 2010: The UK-built Zephyr unmanned aerial vehicle is officially the first ‘eternal plane’ in history. i Way beyond wind and weather a new sensing powered by solar panels and fuelling the interviewer’s gabble… …surveillance platform… always there… ii Way beyond eye and knowledge, sand grains lit by the sun. Grains that crunched […]
my journey
my journey has been filled with trees and deer and rabbits and pigeons and cows and sheep and flooded plains and hills; rolling rising and falling like a man’s chest in all manner of green: lime and moss and lichen and oak leaf and fern and grass and ivy, all fed by water, by rain […]
Working Up
Hear this. In my old town house, genteel and shabby, tall-storeyed, phrases loiter in the scullery, waiting for promotion above stairs, there to be liveried, delivered into sentences, sentenced to public scrutiny, sentenced to breath. I am holding mine, but do not advocate lung-burst on your part: the old bells do not ring in the […]
Christina The Astonishing Arrives in Covert Crescent to Prepare The Faithful for The End of Days
Oh Lord, where am I? Where is my narrow cot, my book? Who is this man following me from room to room? Yesterday I let him guide me to the Health Centre – the five wounds of my stigmata sparking fire, eyes blinded by visions. The Paschal Moon began it. The Friday Passion sent me […]
The Laodicien
‘Unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: … I know thy works, that thou art neither cold, nor hot: I would that thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, … I will spue thee out of my mouth.’ The Revelation of St. John the Divine III 14-16 There […]
Upon Feeling Homesick
In my home town stuck in a traffic jam on Pulaski Road I suddenly feel homesick. For a year I stayed away and didn’t think of this road once. Though when I’m stressed my dreams always bring me back to Chicago’s streets. Now I’m actually here waiting for the traffic to move watching the ComEd […]
The Lonely Places
They weren’t to know. I’ve taken years to track a safe path through my head those tricks like tussocks of heather to skirt unreliable thoughts the soft suck of all the lonely places, their deep throats, quick swallow. Out here, a fistful of earth bleeds water, fields wear a shroud of rain. You can see […]