#After Seamus Heaney They are riding from what might have been towards what will come to be, in a locked shot: Missionaries on bicycles greeting Muslim boys, priming the eighties for the troubled future, still pedalling out at the end of the lens, circling the teens like ambushed prey. Mix to desert dust floating in […]
THA2017
The last fare collector of Hiroshima
They found her fingers in a jelly of yen, her skin one with the standard issue fare-bag – a dove in a sen of silver to go to the mountains, oh, if only she went. I have read of a woman who cooled her burns with figs and persimmon. She pared away old skin for […]
A man called Harold
stands in front of me head bowed very concentratedly rolling and unrolling my sleeve I stand very still I don’t want to disturb him I want to carry on standing like this for as long as he is engaged in this I can see that this is something he needs to do and that […]
Kumukanda
Since I haven’t danced among my fellow initiates, following a looped processions from woods at the edge of a village, Tata’s people would think me unfinished – a child who never sloughed off the childish estate to cross the river boys of our tribe must cross in order to die and come back grown. I […]
From ‘Surge’
Blodeuedd
Did she remember as she sat at her tapestry stitching her marginalia of flowers, or when she squeezed in between her sheets and a scent of meadowsweet haunted the darkness, or when she rode over her husband’s acres just after the oak-leaves had opened, bright with the greeny-yellow of hearts of lettuce, a time when […]
Stephanie
She was eighteen, used ‘party’ as a verb, lashes like the whiskers of an oil-soaked seal, devoured books with names like Steamy L A Nights under the duvet by flashlight. I was twenty-three, brooding over John Ashbery between therapy sessions, hunched at the smokers table like a misunderstood genius. I was recovering from a bout […]