Hello

      Martyr   We’d starve sooner than eat with you, or drink; we’d vomit up, spit out, the bribes you bring and will not slake our thirst or break this fast. The stars, more sensitive than us, will blink; we strain our foolish ears to hear them sing,...

    out for a walk first     come the trees their frames                         different in every season today the blinding brightness of new green cutting through the grim skies then come the houses and their doors       a purple one a turquoise among the...

      Sea Bed I cannot sleep. Tonight, the invisible crabs are pinching my nightdress, pouring sand into the folds of the cloth. I can not sleep, they say tonight, there are too many fish in the ocean. They are insisting, clicking and pinching,...

      When I Find You In Tesco, Around Half Eleven Tuesday Morning In the canned food section reaching for tinned beans, basket hung from one hand, the other splayed open stretched to the shelf. All of you lifting upwards, feet coming off the acrylic...

      It’s Not The End I’m Frightened Of But The Unravelling My cat wobbles from mat to bowl to bed, a wonky sashay from which there’s no recovery. She’s past sunlit sprawls, there’s just skulking, sleeping, the disconsolate matting of fur. Anxieties...

      Sometimes I Radiate Sometimes I radiate, clouds form in my hair and you breathe from me. I am beech and birch, I am oak ash scrubland, I am waking up. Since I’ve been planted here I’ve been keen to remind you that I come from elsewhere. I don’t...

      Self-Portrait as Grammar Revision Some of my dogs are rich. I hurry not to buy such expensive cars. The dentist jumps highest and my friends can bark loudly. Today I feel like toothache. For my birthday I would like that tree. I shall come to your...

      Stripping the Carcass Stripping meat from the leftover chicken turns my stomach – separating sagging skin from gristle; detaching spinal column from shrivelled vertebrae and bleach-white bone. But I was taught by my mother not to be wasteful, as...

      Two close voices 1 If I remember when the full moon rose while sunlight still warmed the evening’s outline from below I don’t picture you in the scene but understand that you were everywhere each closing bud each bird settling to roost each...

    Parched sparrow Does it ever happen to you? A sparrow appears in your dreams Beak open, mouth parched Waterless desperation in its eyes Night after night of a parched sparrow You wake up one morning with nothing on your mind except the memory of some dry...

      Noticeable The greatest quality of the only person who has ever noticed me is that they think that I’m noticeable. In school everything that made me noticeable made me a target: the birthmark on my face that everyone in my class gave a different...

J V Birch lives in Adelaide. Her poems have been anthologised, exhibited and published in Australia, the UK, Canada and the US. She has three chapbooks with Ginninderra Press and a full-length collection, more than here.  

      The Key of Dreams That’s not René Magritte with his apple on his hat not holding a pipe. While he’s not there, he’s been dispensing French words chalked in a clear cursive hand, because words make good pictures. He’s no fool and in his sober...

      People in glass houses A woman couldn’t make up her mind what character she wanted to be in her story. One moment she wanted to be kind and good the next she wanted to be distant and thoughtless unable to see or hear anything clearly. If she...

      Science Remember, Sir, when I blocked the sink with paper towels and turned on the tap and you noticed only when it poured over the side and splashed on the floor and you swore, ran over, pulled up your sleeve and plunged in your arm up to the...

      For a Journey to the Forest in Time of Snow Purse, dirk, night-cap, kerchief, shoeing-horn, buget, and shoes; Spear, nails, hood, halter, sadle-cloth, spurs, hat, withy horse-comb; Bow, arrow, sword, buckler, horn, brush, gloves, string, and thy...