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      LAUREL She keeps a vigil by lake Kournas each evening when the sun and moon are on an even keel, before their alignment shifts and tilts one upwards and the other into the arid ground. She lights a candle and recalls the chase as the flame quivers...

      High July A sunset walk in the high blue, one of those days that stretches so far you can’t believe the morning belongs to the afternoon, or that either could ever become a night. I would have been here sooner but I was busy cleaning up the mess...

      Ian in the Student House Palmer Park Avenue, Reading, c.2003 I remember this entrance hall, long and painted darkly. There’s a cat, too, somewhere amongst the bins or out in the park across the road. The view from the bay window is not much...

      Happen Yesterday the sea was at our shoulder but we couldn’t see it. Long after the fog had drifted over us Wolf Rock Lighthouse was still reminding us in its old fashioned, diaphragmatic way to take care of sudden precipices and overhangs, as...

      Prayer Shawl My friend handed me a handmade prayer shawl but the truth was I hadn’t prayed in a very long time. The garment was thickly knitted like something my grandmother would have made. I put it around my shoulders immediately feeling safer...

      untitled dreaming of donne’s saints and becoming them in a world that urinates money to live is a torture standing on sticks and licking clocks with no time to hold each other’s’ faces planting cacti between our teeth to smile and say yes to doing...

      Into the Furnace Show us your metal, they say as if I was threaded through with a girder of steel, a strut of unbending resolve. Times are difficult, they say: babes without silver spoons, the unalloyed pain of those without jobs, income. It’s a...

      Semerwater Open water. Before the crowds come with their floating crafts and litter – I prepare myself. I wait for you to find me, hide within the scar of a fell, secret cavern flooded from the hills. I know you’ve long since stopped believing,...

    Mind the gap Warm air billows up my legs. If I close my eyes I won’t see Eva Herzigová’s HELLO BOYS HELLO BOYS HELLO BOYS cleavage as I slide down the escalator. My own push-up bra is wonder-less. It performs no miracles cutting into ribs, hiding spaces...

      Our House Where our house should have been there was a hedge obscuring all but the roof from street view where our chimney pot should have been there was a cap to prevent the birds falling in and our souls from escaping where our front door should...

      Collared Doves She calls them beauty and handsome. I see two collared doves, but understand her chosen names. They sit together on the round feed table, pick sunflower seeds like canapes, leave the hemp; every bird leaves the hemp. Today, just...

      Coda The Old Testament There will be a dog, a great stowaway on the dazzle of a Celt’s smokers cough. All spasm and splint, a mollusc of sawn-off sticklebacks for a brambly tongue, licking bad days off the calendar. Dog, a corpse wax witness of...

      Don´t Let Me Sleep I already had visions laced with these encounters; bitumen coffee, sweet-cake pink. Your body spread before me, Oh god! Your long fingers. Let me offer you my still wet hand A slip of love, another creature dying. Tell me I...

      Wager I need coins. Not for my eyes but a wager, a circle of risky bets. Emptying my purse, I find a handful of silver, drum it on the table. And then I dig in, find actual shrapnel. Wounds become currency. Silent mouths gape punctuation. The...

      Antonyms for “Late-Stage Capitalism” I make noises with my mouth, some of which are words. I hold a receipt between my teeth while I take off my gloves and fumble with a keychain. Most of the stuff in my pockets belongs to something that no longer...