Hello

      The Heart Intervenes, a Dream Poem We are four strangers learning to live together in a new suburb where streets are names from the past. “Good morning!” I precipitate crisis in the kitchen by eating biscuits when no one else thought to bring...

      LULLABY Night drops by In a coat of onyx and blue Lights up his silver pipe And asks how do you do Night perches on my bed Says  - kiss goodbye to sleep Blows smoke rings in the air Throws a dreambone at my feet Night wiggles his long fingers Taps...

      boudicca you’re a brewery down the road i drank a bottle of your finest on the train back from bury st edmunds the red queen (no one will call you ginger) i see you everywhere realised you were also the wetherspoons round the corner the one with...

      Confluence  Stour springs from greensand into lakes marbled with lily-pads hosts to hazes of dragonflies & pseudo-Roman reflections glides sixty-one miles seaward past the rare Black Poplar meanders through chalk      clay      heathland...

      Memories are squirming prehistoric creatures burrowing under my clothes, enlivened by tea in that mug that matches your eyes, Revolutionary Road shown on TV, the airline ticket from our Paris trip leading to le labyrinthe, feet blistered trying to...

  Helen Pletts translates work by Ma Yongbo 马永波    Wander around the Barren Mountain from Afternoon till Evening on the Sunny World Poetry Day Leaving the Dull Books Behind When you enter mountains, afternoons stretch and lengthen like days; mesmerise. You...

      Trespasses Forgive me The E flat on your baby grand (not quite in tune). This same finger in the crack that goes clean through the bungalow’s supporting wall. Then flicking dust from the fringed edge of your floral lampshade. Noticing that they...

      Seventy-one Things Paulie Should Know Farewell to the mountains, high-cover'd with snow, Farewell to the straths and green valleys below; Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods, Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods. My heart's...

      A Bad Spell The rowan by the house is cracked in two, her bark ragged, grown good-for-nothing old. Fungi feed haphazardly and once, a treecreeper, his heart of white running like love on her trunk. A calligraphy of twigs marks wind-spun air, frail...

      Cousin I didn’t know who the call was about, just that it was past my proper bedtime on that surrogate school night, Sunday. I think the grownups had still been up because the landing light was lit for me and it would have been dark if they were...

      Islay: Your last holiday As he fixed scales in Port Askaig, paid in single malts and country charm, we loitered, impostors on an island farm. All at sea on a serenity of sheep, we played monopoly, box tatty and frail. Its missing chance cards, no...

      Bird of Prey Mami, I find myself wishing your memory were a bird of prey— red-tailed hawk or black vulture, just as long as the talons dig, long as edges curve into outstretched fingers. Oh to pierce through that final blur, I’d prize any...

      One Winter’s Line Between underpants and saggy bra, she hangs her fallopian tubes out to dry. They dangle like a pair of tan tights, dancer’s legs in the wind. She bends, reaches inside the basket, mistakes her vagina for an old sock. She...

      Night night knocks inside my dream at the end of the world death house where sawdust covers everything. i am fortified with evening rubble. there are even rooms that repeat themselves as poor excuses or after-dinner cigarillos in a bag of night...

  If you’re asking how to get invited If you’re asking how to get invited To draw at a sex club It’s fair to say You’ll never get invited to draw at a sex club But here’s a tip: try to board a bus, Get sandwiched in the closing doors Because the driver hasn’t...

      After learning about the maternal instincts of seals, I took to listing postpartum offensives a hen pecks a king cobra a wildebeest confronts a cheetah five lions are attacked by a ballistic giraffe a monitor lizard suffers a wild pig bite a...