Legacies   My father died and my mother, Made tea. We ate Dundee cake, And sliced a life, Into jobs and hobbies, While the minister took notes, And declined sugar lumps.   We...

  The World of "Absolutely" - and Other Clichés In the surprisingly hermetic world of Anglophone communication, original language is as rare as a horned toad in the Antarctic. Ralph Nader once...

      Mothers know the mercurial properties of time Frail baby bird in your incubator, arms bent like wings, unfledged and translucent, your face foreshadows old age, as if time must...

  Death and sunflowers. A tattoo of sunflowers around a baby’s face brings up thoughts of godlessness and anarchy from my stomach as each day wished away remains unformatted a broken line of...

    Wanting Out The rare sunshine of a stormy summer. Greta, Gwenda, leave their checkouts, slink from their supervisors, for a tea break fag. By the pathway’s bench, they watch a cat in...

    I Never Fancied Forever You with all your black hatred You with your endless lips Hard as rock Soft as earth Your sound a hiss a whisper Is silence forever? You know I never fancied...

    Caffeine He doesn’t like these franchised places with their name-tagged “baristas”, groomed to be excitable and toothy. (As students should never be.) He doesn’t want cinnamon...

  Stubb Road Stubb Road is a snake of clay Enticing me To play in the rustling brown brook; Sticklebacks dawdle, wait to be caught. I lift the jar to watch them. They twist to avoid my giant...

  Quiet herself She is not herself They say She is saying things She would not normally say They excuse her for it For the time being at least Yet If they thought about it a little more They...

      Fleeces The conversation drips like laudanum from a thick glass bottle; they are sheep butting heads in a field of grass comparison: who has the best grass? Are our lambs at the...