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      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...

      Episodes a moth has swiped a thought right in front of my face a flicker and gone pure cheek the wing brush lingering my eyes scan the walls for pulsing fool’s silver smudges on the ceiling the ghost of a white shoulder bumblebees prey on me...

      Dormouse Summer When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning – how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse. Byron, Journal 7 December 1813 Missing the small...

      A Death (After Tu Fu) The night is bottomless. I can’t sleep. Darkness smells of winter. Stars fade away, beyond my reach, like waves on a distant beach. In mockery the polestar dies last of all. My wine bottle is empty. I can only bow my head. My...

      Demise We had a lovely time At the horror-house. I don’t quite remember When, now, only That it was the last day The flowers bloomed And the bluebells all but rang. It was like attending A colourfully black funeral. There was a bite to eat And...