Metamorphoses You tell our daughter that by this time next year she will grow another foot. She looks down, says she’d rather a cat’s tail, and bull horns on me along with a full to bursting,...

          Trying It On In these clothes I'm seventeen with a boyfriend and a job, and somewhere to go on Saturday night but the empty Topshop bag sags like a parachute come...

      3am Sestina I I walk through the night’s unquiet. A few gin-blushed drinkers bleaching under streetlamps, breathing in the overbite of a cigarette, the promises of clocks. And...

      Filming ‘Blood Shot Silk’ – Deleted Scene (28) A string-section clambers its incidents. Fustian trails at an unshut hatch.  Cut to… Candle-light across a jade wall – An...

      Clowns Every few years we get the chance, stroll down the road, tick another box or two, decide which toad will screw us over for the next few, break promises so easily made,...

      Harmonies We don’t listen to the music no more: the small sounds of the wind as it whispers through grass, or the well-deep silence of stars. People take it as hard, to see the...

      Sestina for Sujata   I tried calling but you didn’t pick up - It’s an ordinary sort of day - Arjun is learning Hindi letters, Two languages colliding in his head. Taxes and...

      The Distaff Side Looms dragging red kisses on the inside of the knees we clutched to our chests by night. As Penelope and her girls unpicked theirs we dreamt of ours, under the...

      Graveyard Tour The drilling rig stood in the dark middle of the night in the center of North Dakota, its strings of bright bulbs the only light for fifty miles.  Two large-cab...

  Flickers and Flames   Sound the sirens for the smoke in the rain. It enveloped the sky and the conversation. It burnt brightly and stopped the trains They came running with speculation...