Hello

      Dusk Was Yesterday Alone, I drive along the midnight, winter road. My left hand at the 12 o'clock position of the steering wheel. And I coast. I let out the day’s long breath, which started out today as a sigh. Somewhere off in the distance, I...

      Ode to Remission My mother is here, and might not have been, so I hold things tighter: the small-getting-smaller of her running with my daughter down the beach, every conch and whelk they gather, the scar tissue just peeking out of her swimsuit,...

      Glove My stubby maroon glove spent a chill night on the velvet ridge of Clent Hills tangled in summer-dried grasses and snapped seed heads, pecked at sniffed at and tumbled among crusty rabbit droppings. Cuff sheltering tucked-in snails and slugs,...

      Bin Day It’s Wednesday and / again / I’m laying pages of newspaper on the kitchen table / tipping up the food waste bin / scattering teabags and potato peelings and orange pith in a pile / and wrapping it up like chips from the chippy / so the...

      Pilates Zoom We cultivate the knack of getting down on the floor and back up three or four times each day. The constellation of cables, chips and thin air through which our leader observes us is mysterious as prayer, more predictable, precise....

      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...