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      Watching my grandmother view ‘The Song of the Lark’ ‘89/‘26: a Snám Suad   Peach skin wrists, Watch persists Her through time Suffusing. Scythe in hand, Walk the land- Heart commands Amusing. Lark in song Sings along, Mind made of Believing....

      You Can Eat the Evidence The peach parts badly around the stone. You give me the larger half and lick the torn place on your thumb. I have no objection to being alive at this particular table. Before breakfast I buried the calf. The spade struck a...

      Gathering Mushrooms in the Shadow of a Barn One had a ball of water that magnified the word shiver on its cap, and one had been torn and thrown against the wood, a soft bomb, leaving gills and skin. I knew enough to give them names and say the...

      Dog's Life Listening to a memoir and discovering the writer’s dog is on the same SSRI as you is an odd feeling; I don't horn in on a dog's life, chase balls, sniff crotches, but our brains work in similar ways it seems: carrot, sticks, a reward...

      Here is a cross You said you’d never die here.  Here are your Sundays watching your children’s birthdays  on your screen. Here are your winters crating up grocery trucks,  pineapples scratching rough skin. Here are your summers  slating the roofs...

      The Bee and the Lemon Tree like a lover the bee visits the tree every day on the window ledge the little tree is sky goddess the breeze speaks to the bee-wasp love circles in the air the hider in the lemon leaves a thought hums a tune scent dances...

      After a Stillbirth He had been told the trolley would be in the corridor at noon. He could get sandwiches. It was normally for mothers only but they’d make an exception. His wife won’t eat anything. He has to do something. He cannot sit and be...

      Fish and Chips When I went round the next day with a bottle of wine, his wife said he was bruised down both sides from squeezing through our upstairs bathroom window. He’d been on his way to get more fish from the freezer at the end of their...

      Poison Takes the Place of Food   There’s no one in the flat when I come home from school, my dinner in the fridge – poison on a flowered plate, covered with tin foil, surrounded by full shelves of poison. I warm mine up, dust with salt but it...

      A mouthful of stones The sister I don’t have has pockets bulging with silver-foiled chocolate and popping candy, rustling- wrapped strawberry surprises and infinite packets of unopened love hearts. She leaves me the pocket full of stones, ones my...

      Cine Reels On screen, Dad was the radical – the introverted pen-and-notepad kind, donkey jacket, beard, betrayed. Another time he played a photographer eyeballing Liverpool – statutes, pigeons, couples out to lunch. Thieves snapped in the act. Our...

      Some of This Is True Sun comes out, my body opens all its folding doors, its windows. Sun comes out, my body floats – like feather, cirrus, floats across the grass. Sun comes out. Under the apple tree in the hammock, my body lays me down. Sun...

      Monocle remember when we lived in the shrubs? stewed in a shared room. its stench. our own ripeness torturing lungs scored elastic. remember as well as thieving, together we hauled the laundry of our bodies pretty-with-dumb into a service kitchen...

      Flintinge When my dad was a boy, his parents brought him into the fields. As the whole town picked sugar beets, their breath hugged furrows in pre-dawn darkness. I think of the tug he was taught, the sound of roots wrested from the earth cold in a...

      minding eggs a line of hanging hooks bent us into the dining hall where we ate like birds all girls minding eggs a school project for cracking up blue girl brown tray beige egg empty locker room jumper stretched over knees navy wool egg...