Hello

      / on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain / dish en route from dishwasher to shelf thinks...

      Then tragedy makes children of us all and in that last moment the dead shrug, shake off their boots, shuffle off jackets and shirts, watch astounded as their dresses grow and drop to their feet. Their bags, their glasses, car keys and phones...

  This poem was sparked by my own care experience and more recent indirect involvement. The poem itself does not require analysis, beyond what lay behind me writing it. Two years ago I was invited by Lemn Sissay to be part of a feature in The Observer at the...

      You Ask Me if I’ve Had a Nice Day Are these the words you want me to say about how my day became a raging river crashing through my bones? Its giant stones thumped my body like the fall of a hammer. Does that terrify you? Have you managed a day...

      Living Flashback My room is infested with bedbugs I'm covered in bites, not love bites I have to spend the night on the low secure unit That I've only just been discharged from. The paranoid nurse who signs me in thinks I've been tricked And that...

      on accident (for Adrienne Rich) I want to borrow gods (as Adrienne does, though she knew better) their sad logic their templates but there’s always a tell, no? a too close accuracy not confidently misremembered studied would you be disappointed...

      Coal House Fort Turn the mud. Bo Peep’s head tumbles out, wide-eyed, mouth a little open. There’s no sign of her body, her crook, her flock. Perhaps they’re deeper in the riverbed, or washed down to Tilbury by the tide. Drop her into the wooden...

        باز هم  دوربین ها می چرخند زمین سرگیجه می گیرد و  CNN بالا می‌آورد آمار کشته ها را این شعر را       Men are the color of soil Women are sitting on the ashes And white sheets are losing their color Because of children’s blood...

      It is smell that forgets us last      even if we would forget ourselves Babusyu your coffin laid on the frost             I was not there   Odourless and tasteless  you are                  as water I can never...

      Losing it before the UFO can find a parking spot Used to be the stain inside a makeup bag, glossed on inside cheek, socked on the stairs, Auntie at the Embassy, the sink over adverts and the sinnerman, and too much, I’ll keep going: my face, not...

      Calm before the storm Afternoon hangs in the air, and the birds leave. Frogs begin to talk to each other, and the heat congeals. The wind picks up. That sound is not the rain, rather the tall pines across the road shaking needles, trembling. The...

    Without a Following If you could call that friend, the special one, the one you always love and know loves you, if you could and she were not also dead, she would be the one to let you go. Even so, let go, even without her you can do this, alone, if you...

      Presence of Trees Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves are rising in forest sap, to make connections inside strange green brains nothing will be crossed in, nothing will be crossed out until the dead poke holes in the sky with their bones...