Birds Are Prayers: I Never Told Him These attic windows are old and high, heart-stained to seduce the sun down. While I sleep, someone pull the bleeding thing through the...

    from Second Sequence   3.   Morning noticed me almost brisk between the marigold and the buttercup   Delight before the world and fear of encountering a woodsman...

  Bird Woman I’m waiting in a cage that glitters with scatterings of costume jewelry like bird droppings. Jewelry pinned to my pillows, to my sheets, glinting with violence. Ready to blind....

      Broom [After ‘Waltzer 2007’ by Susan Collis, mixed media] There’s a broom in the corner of the gallery, Propped on one leg, keeping its head down. You might miss it. Stick with...

      Goldilocks I breathed rabbit skin all day, let the smell into me like bad manners I feel curl up in my lungs. I saw the split in the rock and slit in. This is home, I suppose,...

      Maybe a Fox When Mary put the dog to bed, she didn’t notice the face behind the cat flap – and if she had, she’d have assumed it was the cat, or maybe a fox or rat. When she...

    * My shelf has room for two serving plates, five bowls and one slice of moon glow. Hallow mouth of the moon. Clouds cross forming an airy handkerchief. Summer evening. Sun and moon...

      Further extracts from The Old Man in the House of Bone Outside the house of bone, beyond the tangled wood there are storms, winds howling, people being born rain pours and...

      Abracadabra The man on the bus Keeps staring at me from his seat up front Conspicuously turned around No one else notices It’s a vehicle filled with ghosts and stooges All of us...

      The Color of Death her skin chips off around the arms like seashells then darkens just above the ankles… a hundred years on the stretcher * I visit after the stroke and hear a...