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      Ripening The earth cracks and we are left with the same shared moon. She peers through my lattice window and hides behind your city’s smoke. Have you ever caught her covertly climbing the ladder, the hoards below are distracted watching the...

    Money for Candles The neighbor is a devout woman. She bakes bread and lights candles, scolds the noisy children of others, and dresses in modest clothes. Everyone in the building fears her. They believe she can see through skin. Let someone lie or even...

      Does anybody want any money? I've got all this money lying around. Have you got anything you can do with it? I asked Josie but she doesn't want it. Klio says the extension is already paid for. Geoff has a job and wants to pay his way. Craig says...

    Love What fell between an abrupt shower and a sky’s attitude was your memory. In the small presence of wind under a tree, I stopped renovating your image, after the silence ploughed over, the days we spent in front of each other, agreeing that the...

      Ramadan Colleagues munching bap and burger thought Ramadan was that juicy winger, his scorching pace soon snaffled up by City. Giving stuff up, they say, is murder - and two weeks into Lent they bring a secret snack to work through sheer...

      BLACKBIRD IN THE EARLY MORNING   Sings at the top of the bare-branched tree an aubade to morning welcomes the light, early spring, season of nest-making. This melody is not for me but to attract a mate. I walk the dog under the dulcet notes and...

      Poseidon at the Spill as the tanker tore its throat against the shallow spine, as the village unravelled when the sea took fire; in a hi-vis flower of diesel light, he rose. finding his tongue tang-stained with oil he yanked his ankle-chain to its...

      Wood Anemone   Between the trees dust shifts, light fractures like a prism. A cathedral silence greens the air. The soil smells of damp books. I see them — paper-thin, spreading on the dark floor of the wood. Still as a shut door. Nothing...

      Fancy etymology for a vacant lot The French term terrain vague enfolds a plot of land I thought at first was vague, undefined and malleable. As a noun, this vague echoes on the edge of its meaning: perhaps a patch of earth evoking a wave, capable...

      sclerenchyma mornings I wake wary of abundance wondering why I’m still here and then I recall all the green leaves with their hiding birds and the slow triumph of ripening pods here lily stalks move like living things for this is what they are...

      Longing golden shovel after Czesław Miłosz I’m trying to stop thinking about what I want to not // be. Sometimes I have looked into my heart and found that // everything’s packed up. The space so unassuming that I // catch myself thinking, where...

      I want to be two-tongued again To go back to the time when I slipped from one language to another with ease, when I knew the contours of my Irish home. To stand with Dad by the window, chat in the room of our own tongue about my day, my dreams. I...

      Revisited Trees after Harold Monro from Trees: lingering their period of decay in transitory forms. I One summer afternoon, you find yourself needing respite from the light and glossy sepia, from sweat and the rosacea. You retreat back to your...

      Lightbulb Moment only now  is it apparent     how dishonouring a body is a crime why did this not            imprint light up       in me           before that when in films       lynching desecration               has a price gives...

      At Aber Falls   he felt nothing water sheeted past grottoes snakes of tributary lazed along below Yr Wyddfa a steam train sauntered by sun-sharp tufts of grass and black tears of earth upward away and all the land beside the train slipped down...

      the colour of I notice her because she doesn’t have a dog in an afternoon of dog-walkers and she’s wearing a yellow coat it looks like a good coat, I know that much maybe the yellowest coat ever sewn she’s alone, stamping along the river bank...

      A Vision after Sujata Bhatt the goddess of the library extends in cloth-bound curves along a lettered shelf sometimes her skirts are leather trimmed with gold, hems starred with colophons in other corners, she's Make Do and Mend, relics held...