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      Box of Disquiet truth be told part of me has lived in this box of disquiet for years and years let’s see one still summer’s day two of my teeth came out baby teeth plop plop ripe pears falling from my mouth I gasped and flushed poked my finger in...

      Essay on Craft Because a woman woke up and her head had become a flower. Because the images were placed in a way that pleased the eye. Because if she’s not careful the scalpel can cut. Because once a woman is glued down it’s difficult for her to...

      Oxygen eaters A candle eats away at air At the same rate that we do Dripping on glossy glassware The wick swallows and chews Exhaling whispers of CO2 At the same rate that we do Familiar tempo, parallel breath Wax runs and the flame exudes Eighty...

      Box A teacher guides his pupils past headless marble torsos, dusty cabinets of tiny Attic coins, pockmarked stylobates, to a large clay pithos, Said to be the original Pandora’s Box, he tells them, reading from his Lonely Planet Guide. They stare...

      Yoga For you, with your toddler bendiness, the squat is a natural, easy position while I hurt-strain, thinking of miners crouched outside their front doors on terraced streets, practising every day in the cramped conditions of their work until the...

      Summer Job Heads under bonnets mechanics catch a wiff of a girl passing half-hearted whistles follow my skeleton into Accounts my Friday wages will buy Mum and Dad a market stall tea set with piped dragons all venom, hissing icicles of flame...

        extract from The Keen Is ar scath a Chéile a mhaireann na daoine: It is in the shadow of each other we live. Watching with the dying. Travelling with the dead. Phyllida Anam-Áire; The Celtic Book of Dying, Findhorn Press, Vermont, 2022 Àite...

      When The Threat of Hell Failed God created the lanyard, made his errant offspring under-managers, then sat in reception with his badge printer twanging his blanks. Man became the shine of the plastic, the snick-snack of the badly made clip, the...

      The Minotaur Oh me! This whiteness of my skin and hair in the sick light which seeps into my prison This tufted tail my distal siblings mocked before I was pulled from my mother’s pumping breast (my mother, who loved me) Her shrieks resound down...

      Something about this   Something about arriving somewhere new just as afternoon is leaving something about parking in the market square set out with tubs of civic planting and stepping out across the space looking for the narrow lane frothed with...

      Variable South East Wet rocks and tree roots on the descent make me afraid of falling— feet and heart are focused on rescue. The silence and peace of this place creeps through on birdsong. Grainy morning light clears slowly across the valley. As...

      A Cherry Tree in Scraptoft The instruction invites overthinking: describe your hometown through the medium of simple sentences and limited [foreign/new] vocabulary. My home is beautiful (isn't this obligatory?) There is a small park (gifted to the...

      Pork Chop I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive, ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not something I know how to cook. Anyway it’s January, I’m vegetarian today, and it’s raining. You can have curry, I tell him....

      Science Communication I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other. We sit in a control room connected to dozens of monitors, sensors and trackers trained to...

      A Croc in the Field for Harry Paterson Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift has hacked the WiFi password in the ear canal and now I’m looping back endlessly to a misheard lyric: “you picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille, with four hundred...