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      Lot’s Wife I think today of the boy in choir class who closed his eyes when we sang about Jesus. Who swayed, as if the Lord himself was in the room. I sat in the back row and braided my girlfriend’s hair. Men are allowed to worship each other. To...

      ‘Attention, after all is prayer’ (Jo Bell) We saw a kingfisher threading the bright needle of his body along the river. We saw a shag, stamping her prehistoric shadow on the sky. We saw a hobby, compact, fierce, not a sinew out of place, alert and...

      The Double My double sits before me now. I stare deep into her, as I do every day after midnight. When I raise my hands, she raises hers. When I wink with my right eye, she winks back. My childish braid sticks its tongue out at us both. "Good...

      Dear Iran after Sholeh Wolpé Even though I only once traced your streets with my own feet, you wandered into my dreams anyway sliding in through my grandmother’s stories, drifting out of the steam of her afternoon tea searching for a place to...

      Marseilles Road -She calls him up- She wills his brush in colour, and chalking, fierce hued flaws, which fall flat on the canvas, She uses a dark outline and replaces his image with cholic fumes. -He doesn’t pick up- He wants to place her in two...

      Muscle memory He thought his heart was broken yet the day began again. He couldn’t marvel in the shine of sunsets rising and falling and yet he rose and fell in turn. His hands resigned themselves to tea making and his legs carried him much the...

      Can I Kiss You?   We were on my pink love seat skin touching skin I was drunk but longing circled me, like stars from a cartoon head wound I nodded you moved towards me and as I parted my lips little hesitations flew as daggers out my mouth,...

      Burning the Years Lay down the worst ones – raze them like swathes of heather on the moor. So what if there’s a dead patch. Remember the havoc unfettered fire makes – flames twirl along the ridge, tumble down the gorge. Unbreathable heat and ash....

      Petition For The Woman Formerly Known As My Mother My Lord, let the record show she remembered everyone else before this. If you must, take her in teaspoons. Temper justice with mercy. Let her forget the wrong men, sharp belts, winters with no oil...

      That Three-Tusked Beast I wasn’t to know that it was a three-tusked beast; that there was not one, not two, but three that grew the seed of me. Back then, who’d ever heard of that unlikely jungle lore? In school there was room for two, no more: a...

      Pollarding An ancient art of tree management, in which the top branches of trees are removed to promote dense new growth, provide light to the understory & fodder for animals. On her first day home, she took to plucking the sky with tweezers—...

      Man in a Room after Interior at Paddington  - Lucian Freud. Which is the subject? Limp-leaved yucca reluctantly dying, the foreground figure in its stony pot? Or the man with a stare glassy-eyed behind spectacles, fixed into absence or challenging...

      What is holding you back from building your wormery? You can’t say there isn’t the time. Everyone has the time when it comes to a wormery. Born with the right tools to hand. And no lack of wood - an affluence of pallet offcuts. Here - the frames...

      House ...4am and the birdsong begins, a wet January in a new city and I’m alone watching a man in Minnesota, murdered for protecting a woman from a fascist hit squad and the politicians are smirking trying to deny the evidence, saying no it didn’t...