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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...

      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...