Hello

      A Town of Shadows Ashington I was born in a town of shadows. The shadow of the black bridge, where boys would crawl, hand by hand, under rails in Beeching’s gaze, cheating teenage death by drop into the lazy Wansbeck. The shadow of the Charltons,...

      Crushed She was only a little woman five feet nothing in nylon stockings. If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent. Lightweight in her youth the heaviness came later. See what you did to me she’d say, scar stretching red across her belly, this is...

      The Language of Inflections When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers shuddered around its edges. The way she said ‘yes’ was a stone dropping down a bottomless well. When he said ‘trust...

      ice cream under the sun   the days are long but the years are short. seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back. i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot. i often imagine myself drowning in her punctuated chaos. the grass is...

      BECAUSE When she is toddling small, she learns to hear real good because she cannot see. Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice- cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to...

  Lesson   A cell, an upright piano. Sentence, one hour. I’ve never shown any interest in music, never tapped out thumps on the dining table, stamped out beats in my scrappy shoes or hummed silly tunes. The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a...

      Skins My mother had a handbag made from the skin of a female cobra her brother killed in the garden. No rrkk-tkking Kipling mongoose to protect her, just my fierce uncle, bantamweight in a stained banyan brandishing cricket bat and torch. Rain...

  Generational Divide She only speaks to me these days through groaning floorboards in the night and slammed doors. Through eye-rolls, half-eaten dinners, and empty packets of birth control pills. Her friends and their mothers are ghosts, glimpses of them...

      Hauntings No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding despite the unearthly hours, the half-light mad sing-song routines of rocking a child back to sleep. A potent cocktail of hormones. Perfect conditions, you’d think, for a woman to slip through...

      As the Festival Wanes I The furniture covered in once transparent now foggy sheets craft the room a morgue, and we identity the bodies, "This cupboard, my mother brought with her from her father's place." "This couch still has my uncle's bottoms '...

      Burning Wings Dark but tolerable The air, itself, no longer sweating. And the yellow moths like some strange throw-away tissues used up by nature circle the lamp hanging above. Nearer and further they stitch, around and back and past me. I see one...

      Grief I wasn’t in, so she left me a note. Each word a tangle of broken ends, some oddly linked to the next with a ghost trail of ink from her rose-gold marbled fountain pen, a rare indulgence she’d bought herself. I think I’m about finished, the...

      Box of Disquiet truth be told part of me has lived in this box of disquiet for years and years let’s see one still summer’s day two of my teeth came out baby teeth plop plop ripe pears falling from my mouth I gasped and flushed poked my finger in...

      Essay on Craft Because a woman woke up and her head had become a flower. Because the images were placed in a way that pleased the eye. Because if she’s not careful the scalpel can cut. Because once a woman is glued down it’s difficult for her to...

      Oxygen eaters A candle eats away at air At the same rate that we do Dripping on glossy glassware The wick swallows and chews Exhaling whispers of CO2 At the same rate that we do Familiar tempo, parallel breath Wax runs and the flame exudes Eighty...

      Box A teacher guides his pupils past headless marble torsos, dusty cabinets of tiny Attic coins, pockmarked stylobates, to a large clay pithos, Said to be the original Pandora’s Box, he tells them, reading from his Lonely Planet Guide. They stare...

      Yoga For you, with your toddler bendiness, the squat is a natural, easy position while I hurt-strain, thinking of miners crouched outside their front doors on terraced streets, practising every day in the cramped conditions of their work until the...

      Summer Job Heads under bonnets mechanics catch a wiff of a girl passing half-hearted whistles follow my skeleton into Accounts my Friday wages will buy Mum and Dad a market stall tea set with piped dragons all venom, hissing icicles of flame...

        extract from The Keen Is ar scath a Chéile a mhaireann na daoine: It is in the shadow of each other we live. Watching with the dying. Travelling with the dead. Phyllida Anam-Áire; The Celtic Book of Dying, Findhorn Press, Vermont, 2022 Àite...