Hello

      Just Because all my life I wanted to meet you and because you were late by three weeks and the cocktail I drank while I waited for you to arrive slid down my throat like orange frogspawn while I gagged over the stainless sink and because when you...

      the lover, always sometimes a man wants to come home to an empty house: there’s no dignity in feeling needy in front of others to want to feel / be the hardness of a man i’m a happy drunk but only when i’m alone so the house is empty / my...

      Queen Wealhtheow: Cup-Bearer I watch her pacing the patterned floor, Passing the cup to punch-drunk brawlers, Side-stepping swords, the too-familiar fumble. A mead-hall manoeuvre so mechanical I can tell: she’s done this before. And tomorrow?...

      Deathbed Wisdom The shadow of her arm falls long across the wall. Once, she’d climbed a bald cypress in summer wearing an ivory shift. Once, she’d kissed a stranger in a rainstorm who tasted of bourbon and sea spray. The electric impulse of her...

      RESISTANT That dream again, the one I have Most mornings now: a foghorn calls Across the river’s mouth, I scan The grey salt distance, pick out groups Of oystercatchers, dunlins, knots And, here and there, an avocet, Then turn and take the path...

      ON BEING GHOSTED BY A FAMOUS MUSICIAN Nobody knew he had a glass eye, but when we were alone he’d pop it in and out, like a cuckoo clock, as a sort of intimate party trick. I was surprised by how real it looked, how it followed you around the...

      When You Are Nowhere I only want olfaction in small doses, off my fingers, sometimes it comes when you are nowhere. This is not a joke. I’m going to ride on the back of a lion and sink my hands into his mane, drive my knees into his ribs for grip,...

      Mother Nature She inhabits here laced in hibiscus dancing through marigolds as she weeps low hymns of sparrow’s song fluorescent forests hugging her body while she gayly frolics through a frog pond brushed barefoot as the water hugs her toes she...

      Black Carr im I shall not want… Greensleeves shunted through an ice cream truck in the boroughs, & leaf-gagged noise in this snug gorge….under the corporated ruins of Leeds & Bradford, the mayflower is stage-managed here: spectacular fists...

      Red-tailed black cockatoo (Ngoolyark) Kaarak, kaarak The red-tailed black cockatoos call from bleeding limbs of the blooming Marri. Chet, chet, chet, chet They peck the honkey nuts. Hard fruit falls to the boort and bilara of the djarlma floor....

      The Drowning We slept that summer in the small house Bedded in a meadow of foxgloves and thistles, Just a cry from the ocean -- Everyone knew about the boy Dragged from the water onto the beach, His lungs pumped with kelp and fry -- You’d span the...

    Extended Magic Cat Metaphor Once you disassemble it it’s all fucked up. Turns out just despair held it together. Blinky the magic cat laid sweets — paper-wrapped, coloured or  plain, familiar or unknown like eggs for years, then one day Blinky broke:...

      Panning His gardening cleats punctured her left knee when she stumbled at his feet in a sack race. There was talk of tetanus. In the holidays she pretended to be his nurse. She made sandwiches when he’d just eaten. In case he had forgotten his...

      On Sighting a Truck Named after a Planet The van at the end of my road has a name: Saturn Removals. I like the sound of that. No fancy intros. The driver steps out, straight down to business. He’s bigger than I expect and the ice-rings that circle...

      Tearing i.m. Rose Strowman what a thrill for a kid    running up the staircase he’s climbed a thousand times before and seeing the wardrobe    for the first time not as a boring white object     but as a newfound treasure trove    because    this...

    Our Bedroom There in the bed, like dirt or blood, someone else lay, not sure who.  They smelt like apricot and drove us wild.  We all twisted in the duvet and rolled up tight like a burrito.  Sweating and swearing, knotted up all angry-like, dirty white...