Hello

      Waking Up The night before we left we smoked opium for the first time and didn’t sleep. In Brindisi we lay down in a corridor and slept before the ferry took us to an island where there was a warehouse for the mad. (Now I know the mad are awake...

      What was Lost Something black is humped far ahead on the path. Perhaps some small creature fallen from where it should be. I am unsure whether I saw it move. Once I found a fledgling crow on the pavement, lifted it to a low branch on the tree...

      Awaiting Update We cannot update you yet, other than to say we are caught in a doldrums between stations and that your father can wait as he has been waiting these past two years, somewhere in the heat-bitten brickscapes of London, the memory of...

      Compline A woodpigeon calls his five-note matins. Petals ratchet wide as the sun rises. A butterfly’s haphazard wing beat. Reverberation of a gong, sandalled feet on tiles. Golden leaves in the gutter, the downpipe’s digestion of rainfall. Petals...

      Redwood The mineral kin would not know me now, I used to be a cone-coiled code, I mean, I was biding, to flicker into joy. Each day I emerge a little, root deeper, canopy wider, longing burnishing my hardening trunk. Distance from the ground has...

      An Eight Year Old’s May Altar Inside May’s warm beauty I think of God and of the Virgin Mary. I’ve always loved Mary. The time is now — I’ll make a May altar. And I’ll look for my rosary beads. For my Holy Mary I’ll grab the plastic one from the...

      St Godfric gets canonised three sheep and a sharp wind, behind which I feel involvement start to tug. Not at all like the song I composed halfway up Wear’s Bank. It’s happening too early, before I’m actually dead. This park bench and the beck’s...

      The purpose I’m six days late and this is known as a delinquent period. We’re amused by this if nothing else. The first thing you do after I say pregnancy out loud is sit on the loo and search sensory deprivation tank London. I see you typing as I...

      Ladybird, Ladybird After Paula Rego’s Nursery Rhymes You seem very far from home and who would after all choose a grit pocked pavement to languish on when they could be eating aphids in my overgrown garden? Mother Mary isn’t coming my way it seems...

      Her Funeral Clouds spit on the coffin, wring oily rags, splash a woman, her violin cased in sunken purple. I wade with the others through the mud clench, she’s beyond now, until the weight of her. My eyes hide behind dark. Damp pallbearers lower...

      Sonnet And did she break your heart? A woman asks, perhaps imagining A fallen chalice scattering Fragments about the tiles, only discovered Days later in corners underfoot. But there was no suddenness More a growing sense of doom A shrivelling of...

      Bringing Pilates to Attention Four years in Knockaloe was a living inspiration for inventor Joseph Pilates. His self-contained exercise in mental- physical health spawned a method which he called Contrology — corrective drills grown within the...

      Save Me   At thirteen I am competing with James Joyce, encouraging pain, at the very least discomfort. See me fervently praying, waiting to receive the Communion host. My knees more than ache, then burn, I bless the wooden pew causing this...

      Slow Worm And here you are slid from the rain under my door, “s” -ing along the cool checks in the hallway. I’ve had slugs silvering the skirting, a hissing squirrel cornered by the stove, even a mouse that made his den next to the cat food… but...

Jade Prince hails from Essex but currently resides in Leeds. She has been published in PEN Transmissions and Poetry & Audience amongst many others, and currently holds a place with The Writing Squad.