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  Funeral   Slowly, ordinarily, the unimaginable happens, lowering the past into the dark, covering it. You’ll live to receive the haunts of jagged occasion blunting to dust and dream in the sift of going on. Till then, though, this keeps you. The bleak clothes...

  Clive Donovan has three poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021], Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and Movement of People [Dempsey&Windle 2024] and is published in a variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Crannog, Ink Sweat and...

      The Last Train Home We left the play early. It was the last day before the start of secondary school. Dad told me off for slapping the seats, wanting to see the dust rise like smoke. Floating to the ceiling, dirtying the lights. The doors hissed...

      Creation Radio   There was a time when I took my radio into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha needle along the dial through noise jungles to silent darkness at the waveband’s end. First there was nothing, or at least my ears couldn’t...

      Greylags Find yourself by the lake, its icy membrane split by the long arrow of a skein, reflected flurry of wings, cries bawling. Knit yourself into a parcel against its shriek, the force shaping your bones, steering you somewhere off course, way...

      Early Morning   The terns lift as one from the salt-pools behind the beach – a thick undulating line the lazy ripple of a shaken-out duvet. They dip, rise and swirl like cream stirred through coffee and dissolve into the mist.     Sarah...

      Spring is in the Air Winter soil is hard and hoar crusted, birds peck with blunted beaks, pushing up are the blind green pods of what will soon be yellow daffodils, given light and air. I wait to hear news about you, hear that you resurfaced,...

      Finders We scoured the parish tip most weeks, when we were kids. We clambered it in wellies.  Ferals, we scavenged in the debris of the adults’ lives. Like a mad deck shuffled, our tip turned up a fat brown teapot without a lid/ a yellow rubber...

      A Basket of Nettles and Larks Life lines still arc round the base of each thumb though the bulk of hand’s muscle mass lies in the thenar bellies, now flat as linoleum and tendons smart branches when I brace fingers, interrupting hillocks of skin....

      The Sky Was Falling There was always, of course, the cold – its freezing pretty fingerprints on our side of the pane. While we lay loved beneath the loaded blankets, a new day shivered through the filigree and mum stretched vests before the 2 bar...

      Love Birds Agapornis They married in a chapel of black steel bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as stained glass. One year in and their chirrups are still hymeneal. Humans can’t help but pass by and beam at this pair, bonded for life. All...

      Barbecue here, water does not run. instead it sits obediently in old plastic containers here, where monkey steals avocado when window is open, here where white jesus hangs from the cross and weeps into the food, where father is a tree and mother...

      Ringed Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net my sister waits for him to untangle her, to hold her head still between thick fingers, feather ruff ticking in each rapid breath, her eyes black and bright, body eclipsed by the size of him, nothing...

      Denizens Mice live in the London Tube. A train leaves and small pieces of sooty black detach themselves from the sooty black walls and forage for crumbs in the rubbish under the rails that are death to man. You can’t see their feet move. They...

      What Mr. Pig Did After Paula Rego   Prince Pig and his First Bride     2006   Mr. Pig modelling his best Sunday suit of farmyard smells, flees from the cook’s cleaver to find himself a sow. This snorty, stinky, porker seeks a succulent female but...

      Medea My heart is breaking, so I’m setting up my new Wonder Oven. The waft of toxicity as I run it on empty for ten minutes is a welcome distraction. Do you know what a Wonder Oven is? Let me tell you. A Wonder Oven is so much more than just an...

      This Sea Is Ours We enter in darkness. Naked feet rush over cold pebbles, phone-torches light our pathway to the sea. We shed layers of hoodies, pyjamas, socks and trainers. Seafoam slashes cold against our knees. We swim further into night,...

      You Know What 9am Feels Like, Right? Like, If Your Watch & All Clocks—Suddenly Worldwide—Disappeared, You’d Still Know What 9am Feels Like, Right? The first wristwatch was first worn in 1810, despite what old turn-it-up Flintstones episodes...