Hello

      Eliza Traill All her names The hare. A long way from blue. What is the third thing? Twelve snow buntings in a shadow house. What she sees A large stone lintel. A hollow enclosed in a curved wall. Small white bones. A now completed circle. The...

      Meditation on Your Bare Feet In the fruit-apple crimp of glamour and fizzing pressures I found your feet, your painted nails, So Much Fawn, a rose-colored soul, flagrance of motions, though you were miles away; the image of a small rose on the...

      Dinner in the Fields I remember you arriving to the fields when we saved the hay, bringing the sweet taste of dinners, encased in Tupperware, sitting sheltered under haycocks, in the warm sun. We rested our young bodies from sweating our work,...

      Pied Piper Your voice echoes through my body rumbling into veins and curves. Turns me into wood; stiff and tied to your tongue - your lungs - your vibrating throat - every hum is a drum beating me into your shadow, copying every movement,...

      Firewood They tell us that we are grown from the same soil our hands will all bleed in the right place a hidden resonance behind wry smiles placed inside dormitories and suitcases. If we are from the same soil and root why is one hand much older...

      Open Love Letter I'm ready for love now, now that I'm falling apart, now that it's hard to find a centre where resistance can collect. I'm ready for love now, now that the handful who loved me have gone; more ready than I've ever been, as I clutch...

      Magpie Lawn There they are the two magpie brothers strutting their message across the lawn. Inside she watched from the high wide window halfway up the stairs. Halfway. Standing on the stairs. Watching as the magpies spread their lonely black...

       Well Chilled Yesterday I spent the afternoon with Vladimir Putin. He was in a good mood and kept giving me more beer; he personally attended the barbecue, serving up chicken wings and he laughed and joked with everyone, including me. You could...

      Cure I asked the doctor what was wrong with me. He held his stethoscope to my amygdala. Thought there was something blocked. Try writing, he said. I have, I told him. Had to put a bung in my pen. Stuff kept dribbling out. Can't you check my...

      Fairies There is little to be told about them really: they took my teeth, left modest coins and a note sometimes on paper blue, detailing private lives among frogs and wrens, schemes for the bloody stumps, the writing crazed as a butterfly's...

      (Untitled) Oscar had faith in me; I sang without breaks, effortlessly reached the  highs and lows,  was the voice on the love songs he wrote for his wife. When he fell in love with me, he bought me a bamboo flute, highly polished, an object of...

      Death Rattle Back in the day, everyone loved a good hanging – curiosity gathered in the town square, red-nosed, waiting for the theatre of mortality to end. Today I attract the equivalent crowd – have to untangle my vocal cords from intrusive...

      Shtriga The evil eye is when someone you love looks at you but they aren’t there. My mother is now a Disney villain; the sun has become an insult. She should be fitted with a blood-black velvet cape. Pale blue eyes in a hard-set face stare out...

      The Art of Collaboration Whatever job he’s given, the collaborator is a perfect fit. A man of no fixed particulars. His views are plastic and always on the verge of being melted down and made otherwise. His life is a full orchestra of raised...

      At the Birmingham markets When I was young, before the sky was torn, I strutted in-and-out of poisoned jobs and bare-walled rooms, poor yet indestructible, naive and full of quirk and piss, not belonging but belonging, knowing more than anyone...

      Thief You took my index finger and showed me where to go. My thumb you painted green. What do you want to grow? My elbow helps you move across a crowded room. But why'd you take my mouth? What will you say, to whom? You swept my feet away and left...

      You There you are again at the far end of the empty beach, scrambling over rocks beneath the abandoned nunnery painted ice-cream green. Fleet as a greyhound, tiny as a mote floating in the outer corner of my eye, matted hair a billowing ghost of...

      How to let it go Pick it up. Feel the weight of it in your hands. Pinch, roll, squeeze, flatten, slap it like fresh clay. Own the reactions of your body. Pinpoint the lump in your throat, the knot in the lowest part of your abdomen. Coax the howl...

      Nothing ever happens A familiar slideshow of picture postcards sidle by through the bubble of your train window; trees new in leaf and freshly-printed lambs, fractured stonewalling clinging impossibly to hill, separating off precious little from...