Hello

        extract from The Keen Is ar scath a Chéile a mhaireann na daoine: It is in the shadow of each other we live. Watching with the dying. Travelling with the dead. Phyllida Anam-Áire; The Celtic Book of Dying, Findhorn Press, Vermont, 2022 Àite...

      When The Threat of Hell Failed God created the lanyard, made his errant offspring under-managers, then sat in reception with his badge printer twanging his blanks. Man became the shine of the plastic, the snick-snack of the badly made clip, the...

      The Minotaur Oh me! This whiteness of my skin and hair in the sick light which seeps into my prison This tufted tail my distal siblings mocked before I was pulled from my mother’s pumping breast (my mother, who loved me) Her shrieks resound down...

      Something about this   Something about arriving somewhere new just as afternoon is leaving something about parking in the market square set out with tubs of civic planting and stepping out across the space looking for the narrow lane frothed with...

      Variable South East Wet rocks and tree roots on the descent make me afraid of falling— feet and heart are focused on rescue. The silence and peace of this place creeps through on birdsong. Grainy morning light clears slowly across the valley. As...

      A Cherry Tree in Scraptoft The instruction invites overthinking: describe your hometown through the medium of simple sentences and limited [foreign/new] vocabulary. My home is beautiful (isn't this obligatory?) There is a small park (gifted to the...

      Pork Chop I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive, ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not something I know how to cook. Anyway it’s January, I’m vegetarian today, and it’s raining. You can have curry, I tell him....

      Science Communication I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other. We sit in a control room connected to dozens of monitors, sensors and trackers trained to...

      A Croc in the Field for Harry Paterson Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift has hacked the WiFi password in the ear canal and now I’m looping back endlessly to a misheard lyric: “you picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille, with four hundred...

      Poet Dead [after Rilke] Laid down, his upraised face is White – offputting – on a plumped pillow. How life takes the He-Who-Knows And His senses and disallows, Absorbs to the year's disimpetuousness. Saw Him alive did the comparative dunce: me. I...

      Pieces “The all-consuming passion is rarely found more than a recipe for misery,” you read and told me you would see about that and joked “Can two people be engaged who are already married?” But it seems I was right after all. I remember the Dali...

      Watching the woodpecker at 5.30 am He appears like a paper bag blown onto the feeder, punching his beak time and again into the peanuts. The minute he sees me he’s off in bouncing flight. Today, it’s early, and I’m sipping tea in the kitchen. He...

      Pleasing the pwca If you follow faerie lights that wisp where boardwalk becomes trackway, make sure you’re stocked with milk, or bread and salt. Simple gifts to please the pwca. And if you live to tell, you will have been lead through the safe...

      Pink Flame My father stitched an evening with current ripples spill over rocks and shadows gather at the corner, Something sweet he whispered, repeated in present tense, joy he folded with care and never used it. He hung his favourite portrait on...