Hello

    Annette's Ode Slithering through incisor-gap, English leapt from your lips to mine, a string between you & me, ringed with hot coals we slide back & forth in the air like abacus beads. Coals that warm & warn: lighting the way as best they...

    How It Ends There is an album of all the men your mother have loved. It sits every night in the deep silence of the basement. Tonight, your mother burns the album, she pours fire into her longing. Every memory carries a flame, every man with his own ash....

    Great Depression If they ask where I am, tell them: I am wintering. I have secreted small acorns of sadness in crevices of gnarled limbs and shall be savouring their bitternesses on the back of my tongue until the days lengthen. But mainly, I’ll be...

    the universe in her face she said she was a teller of stories her name was elspeth, elspeth davie it was so strange to meet her in the dark tunnel beneath the liffey cold we were, the both of us coatless and unwashed a hot shower would be delicious she...

    You always ate oranges I am peeling an orange at the end of something At the end of a line from each time you took up the fruit Dug your thumb in, hooked out a chunk of skin Pulled pith from flesh from round heralding its colours so loud no one could...

    Mum’s Skull Contains a Vacuum Cleaner Every five minutes it does its job, hoovers every inch of her memory, declutters all pains and sorrows. It booms, roars, heats up, leaves no space for nostalgia. When I ask her if she’s had dinner, she says she...

    The Work of Hands And once the father frowned As the boy struggled to fasten The drawbridge on his fort. ‘He’ll never be any good With his hands’ he declared, As if the boy wasn’t there. And once he beat the boy For palming a Dinky toy His mother refused...

    Afterlife Perhaps the friends of Lazarus, who died and slipped his shroud, on seeing him might swoon or rush to hear the tales of that beyond they hoped and feared to face. Perhaps some cried or shook and got themselves quite drunk by noon. Or had the...

  The Memory of Lives incarnation. God in his worn, greasy jeans like a car mechanic is lighting a new life from an old one. a new cigarette from a cigarette butt. and you are merely a flame between the two worlds, smoked on an empty stomach. while he breathes...

      Erato It takes ages. Tell me what it is you’re after she says, when finally I get through. Rain, I answer, rain that falls softly in a garden, and on the Aegean, the noise they make together, trees in the rain, and the way rain brightens the green...

      Olympics I devoured the Olympics, filled my mouth and scrapbook with sticky ephemera. I stalked a torch, seized my shining, perforated prey, and stared into the void of Wenlock and Mandeville’s eyes. Sometimes, I am in the Olympics. I crawl from...

      Craftsmanship beneath night’s skin he unearths raw stones serrated     encrusted    enigmatic    cold tumbling them in two-twenty grit wears away the dull four hundred    six hundred highlights the delicate garnet’s exposed seam     agate’s...

      Morning Outing with Mum we are at a cafe        just round the corner from hampstead heath                     & sipping berry sunrise smoothies    out of soggy paper straws        we are watching tangles of cockapoos too many       north...