Hello

      Charm for a walk     In a dull sky the guttering flame of a white heron, drawn down to the bourne. Then a field of black dock fluttering and rising like a bedsheet of crows. The webbed slush that vanishes to the touch. Did you pay for...

      Secrets     We could tell there was something we weren’t allowed to know. Something kept hidden from us children, something not quite right with Mr Jones. We wondered why his wife had rabbit-in-the-headlight eyes. When blue lights came...

The Rescuers       When the waters broke we were out there, borderless, with just a view of bloodshot sky from the labour suite, his weight a nautilus shell, face pinched in perpetual sleep, one silk eyelid pulled awry as dawn held him at the edge of...

Forecasts of Flight Stripping wallpaper leaves naked the scrawls of yesteryear’s children, small forecasts of flights that are inevitable. Youthful skill teasing dreams of rocket ships, large soaring birds, treasure islands, galloping horses, and measurements of...

  Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep       Goodnight moon, goodnight stars, goodnight cherry, pear, apple tree. Goodnight pond, stop wriggling, newts, stop zipping the water, water-boatmen. Goodnight, glossy horses on the hill, rabbits in the field, white...

like snow  an etherial whiteness that covers and disguises as a strip of white frosted glass conceals an interior or spray from lorry wheels obliterates the road * the nets across windows blurred reality in childhood pale curtain-light enclosed the room with mystery...

Hot Cross Buns Ambling up North Street on a Saturday afternoon at the end of a long Winter, I am stopped by two women, elderly, smiling eyes and mouths, lip-sticked, offering an open pack of hot cross buns from the NISA shop down the road. The shorter of the two with...

      LULLABY of CALMING – Do you take spec in your tea?       Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist. Landscapes of folding...

The Still Face Experiment  You must have seen that Youtube clip where a mother lets her face go dead. Her toddler carries on burbling for twenty to thirty seconds until she realises there is nothing coming back to her. First it is surprise, even laughing as this must...

      Waiting For Mark After you died, someone asked: What was it like in those final sixteen days waiting for your son to die? I was not waiting. Wanting, yes. Hoping, yes. For more days. Finding joy in small things, a game of Camel Cup, your favourite...

      Writing is a Little Door after Susan Sontag I imagine returning to the house. Furniture is piled up in the rain— the ideas that won’t fit. Dreams can’t squeeze through every opening, especially when they’re big, or floral or velvet with high backs...

          Ilias Tsagas is a Greek poet writing in English as a second language. His poems have appeared in journals like: AMBIT, Under the Radar, Streetcake, Poetry Wales, SAND, FU Review Berlin, Tokyo Poetry, Plumwood Mountain and elsewhere....

      A Curse Shove it, that farewell and the sky shimmering with frost and the waves wrecking on the shore I don’t care if it is basalt by the furious firth hard on hard. And as for the getting there! A mis-shapen day when the sun was unintelligible...

      Rolled-Up Sleeves Tom’s advice, mind you, was to drink hot chocolate last thing at night on a garden bench beneath the moon. So, we sat there. Our eyes grew accustomed to monochrome and to the unusual grammars of darkness. A hazel-nut or two fell...

      Arrival Today, I talked with a friend about death and what it means to have arrived in my life before I have to leave it, what it means to be no longer waiting for my life to start. I did wait, many decades and now – later than most, earlier than...