In my cookery exam, we have to prepare a family meal This is summer and Mum can’t put out her trot line with its hooks because of swimmers so I buy three mackerel from the fishmonger. I cycle to the school bus stop one arm on the handlebar,...

& my sub-tropical heart 
will punctuate the idea of treacling hope
puncturing the sense of a book

across the street 
 
I am washed off my feet
my heart 
splashes up into pieces 

Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel
overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card.
 
It’s down to language, then, imagine.

Twenty- something sex are bodies.
thrown down like sophomore prose.

The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.

Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks.
At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull.

While children kneel at your cage in awe
edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit,
curse words into your magnificent beak,
mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet

      My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...