Hello

      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...

      They were only worried when I started writing at 8, little poems, little stories, growing up in a big city called Tehran, cats and scared people running from Iraqi bombs and the Islamic Republic. I became a teenager and found a guitar sang my...

      Leaving The train is the way, the tracks a scar cut deep in the land you can’t help but touch. Across the viaduct and over the stinking estuary, leave fields behind for factories, waste ground, horses nosing rubbled grass, past a desert of...

      Mum was a raised axe and a party hat. A Victorian wardrobe packed with 1960s kaftans. She was the twist and the shout, the let it all hang out. She was convent school and wine cellar. She was a month of Ryvitas followed by a year of cake &...

    XIX The Sun i run like a goat tongue-lolled and                 humping herbicide free positively molding i                 bog-leap and bristle pick peat from between     teeth cut on bone want to be so fucking ugly rolling fetid fox-musked but...

      Sonnet But first the sun has to break in two, that primary streamline naturally forgotten flat place, (that was the first one) we walked together together together all day and night until there was no day only a bird on the brink of land and sky...

      Pearl Osten worked until after midnight, Oct. 2, 1927, in an Eighth street tea room, where she eked out a wage which helped to pay for her schooling. She took a street car to the home of relatives with whom she was staying ... There the trail...

      A Farmer’s Son Watches Galaxies Turn, Groes Bach Spring 1833 – mists folding their sheets in the fields. Isaac Roberts feels the turned earth, his father’s farm an island in the hurtling Milky Way – splashes of cream across the churning ocean...

      Baldwin St, mid-November Wet tarmac blinks red and gold, names shine outside the Gaumont. Stop dreaming, you’ll get lost. I trot to keep up, past the chip shop, past a big man bellowing Mind out! as he shifts a stack of crates, past Carwardine’s...

      Driving lesson Before the first turn of the key, before adjusting the mirror, before releasing the handbrake even, Dad said: there are two things you need to know. The first, he said, is double-declutching. It’s got me out of many a scrape. It...

      If you didn’t know what a storm is This thing will enter your perception with a swagger. Kick open doors, slam wood to wall, shake rooms, with the impatient knock of nature. Alive, but not exactly, as it fills the frame, flicker-lit by lightning....

      This morning the room is bright with snowlight and everything seems illuminated differently. I have to trust the robin’s snatches of song like drips from a melting icicle, the starling’s rush of wingbeats overhead. Narcissi’s tender green shoots...

      Her Yorkshire Puddings Every Sunday he insists on beef from Boggs’s butchers, a forty minute drive away. Mother has no respite from that blasted gas oven, her apron, or the vegetable peeler. Her Yorkshire puddings disastrous, until she fakes it...

      Hard To Say What He Did It's hard to say what he did, my father. His shoulders portaged crates, he captained boats in the night, chocolate eggs would appear which smelt of ChefChaouen. He taught me to listen out for bells and police sirens. He...

      An Orange in the Dark I rolled an orange across daybreak; I waited for the moon to ripen. I held you close, felt your ear in my palm As I paced the candle-lit coffee table. The biscuits had gone stale again As buses crept under the open window—...