Hello

      Going South To Morden There’s a doll’s house-sized grief when I read a book and add a character to my list of favourite names, then remember that I’ll never need it now. I’m as eggless as a vegan cooked breakfast, I’m a photocopier out of toner,...

      Peach For Anne Boleyn My velvet skin turns gold to blush. He waits till just before my flesh turns sour, falls, reveals the stone beneath. He rips each layer with his teeth and I can feel him tasting me, licking round the edges so he doesn’t waste...

      Crocodile in the Underground A skein of children in neatly matched pairs, name-tagged, wearing luminous baldrics and carrying shiny identical satchels, tittup side by side behind their class teacher, overseen by a motherly rearguard. A lag-behind...

      Weatherproof In the weeks before the windows arrive from northern Norway, where they really understand triple glazing, the house is porous. Puddles form and evaporate on the flagstones, laundry is trailed straight through casements, clouds are...

      Weather Gods Winter arrived early in 1443. Prickling air laden with ice needles sweeping down the lagoon snow blankets shutting out light. Galleys half-finished abandoned. I fled from noise of cracking timber hulls my eyelashes matted with snow. I...

      The Candlemaker’s Office was sparsely filled. The worn brass door knob — a patina countless hands slipping over its surface, polished and discolored by each touch. That oak door — turning my wrist lean into it fighting the rub door against frame...

      Making is finding, troubadours know Making is finding, troubadours know, and all that comes to hand is an oarlock socket worn by salt, its oar somewhere freely parting water and a pilgrim soul finding rhythm. Have him push the boat ashore at...

      Workshop exercise For Kate Foley The river twinkles on my right. I’m walking briskly past a pair of disused shipyards whose noisy histories have been condensed to fit on plaques as neat as boiler-plates. The river’s banks are fidgety with ripples...

      The Last Carthusian The large metal bell with which I call myself to prayer is wanted by a museum. I sing in an affected accent the responses to the psalms but the jackdaws which laugh at me from the roof are not fooled. In a refectory which is...

      Heartland I am growing grass inside my ribs; fluted blades twisting their leading edge in meadows of flesh. There are fields of this. Where the lark has left, the wind gusts through – I have become its hollow short-cut and you are corridors...

      Realisation about a friend slowly and deliberately you draw information out of me the way my son eats a strawberry holding firmly onto the green stem sucking it down to the pulp     Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana lived in Japan for 10...

      Egg Inside, it’s containment: a smooth shell curving away into itself, taut around a thin membrane which closes on its viscous, one-celled strength; and it’s a silent circling of mass, unused to air, unexposed to the risk of strange heats, to the...

      Feasting She brought thoughts, words rather than grapes, slipped out among laundered clothes. Little offerings best but today he wanted more and she couldn’t deny him. Her tongue spilled stories he devoured, egged her on until the cough again,...

      Morning has broken Please bear with me one tiny moment while I try to explain: listen: a speck of a half-fledged sparrow doesn’t sit at the top thin twig of a late winter tree and throat his half-formed song for all he is worth, which isn’t that...