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    Deathbed Fantasia as now melts                             & nowhere goes nowhere  we wash up                               breathless a box of blue light                      star-cushioned  harvesting morphine-thick razorlick-blueberry-pinch &...

      You Again  across the street  I am washed off my feet my heart  splashes up into pieces  as if someone has thrown a stone into the pool of me all these years  I thought myself dry ground but I am a stream  a loch  a river brim full  sequinned with...

      Grief shows me just another sunset   Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card. It’s down to language, then, imagine. Above parade pearlescent clouds looking more...

      Meaningless sex Twenty- something sex are bodies. thrown down like sophomore prose. Unedited nonsense that almost meant little. Look at our quarry of pointless stars. Davy-lamps in solar system of death Noone writes about God when she rested. I...

    Lapse Graffiti artists, known as writers, are often misunderstood by society. Eden Magazine The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats, declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse. I’d assumed lapse was a tag, a nom de plume or...

      Chavittu Nadakam Canvas boots, pig-iron tacks. At midnight, the wooden platform groans like a hull. The raw earth shakes below the planks, cardboard stage-sets buckling under the stride. The Emperor wears a crown of tinsel, his beard fixed with...

      Roberto - Market Bird While children kneel at your cage in awe edge offerings of cashew nuts, chopped fruit, curse words into your magnificent beak, mums settle carrier bags at tired wet feet delay for flashes of Hulk Hogan yellow beneath that...

      My Name is My Name Ami never let anyone call my sister Sam – it always had to be Samina. She said she’d rather be waterboarded than let her daughter be whitewashed by whites too conservative to spare the extra syllables. Ami never let anyone call...

      Driving on Old Roads The coastline’s smile is sharp with blackened teeth, seabird shelters, scarps, cutaways, broken reefs: the bloody mouth of a boxer who can’t be dropped, punch drunk with the brain’s purple pounding; stopped glaciers, slipped...

      The Art of Walking Nowhere Terrestrial locomotion across concrete, the inverted pendulum, moving flesh and boot – the touchdown softened by slightly worn inner soles. Fascinated by gum stained slabs, I sidestep snails and ants and cut through the...

      Miles of Memory The passenger train along the Connecticut shoreline moves as if in a river of wooden ties and steel rails. It travels through the old industrial towns like Bridgeport, long ago a manufacturer of brass, and places settled in New...

      High Hopes There are blackbirds singing beautifully at dawn, Mozart and Shakespeare existed and that’s fine, but each morning, I pray a new miracle will find its way into existence; elephant birds discovered deep in Madagascar, a cure for six...

      Houseplant daughter (Non-melancholic depression) Tonight, my houseplant child asks about sunlight, brushes my arm as she stutters on the word, photosynthesis, raises her eyes to the bulb as if to say, Will that do? I keep the curtains shut all day...

      Liberty When she asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my mother laughed when I said ‘free’ She’s been dead for more than thirty years – not much freedom in her kitchen-sink life She settled for snatching time out, pausing with that dreamy...

      At the End of the Class   The young woman in a hijab thanked/praised/appreciated me For all I had shown/ encouraged/ inspired in her Asked whether I observed/ took part in/ celebrated Rosh Hashanah? How did she find out/ realise/ discover...

      Bison I wrote the title of the lesson on the board and underlined it with a flourish. The class listened to my introduction. I could see that even Rachel’s eyes were waiting for what I would say next. I felt calm. The pile of marking on the desk...