Hello

      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...

      what you mean to me wiping tears with drink coasters in soho revolving around how you'll both leave and stay men in the window you kissing my jaw by the pints i didn't drink by the ashtray asking when the arrogance of thinking that anything could...

      The pink and the brown   So many times I walked head down   half asleep along that ordinary road to school until the day I saw the cherry trees sick of standing around bored and invisible all at once dressed up sinewy brown limbs embellished with...

    Aberfan The hillside had continued to spill onto the hand-digging first responders. Cliff Michelmore, in stark black and white, his words threading, stitching, beside himself with grief. My mother never cried so much. She’d had the two of us, had learnt...

    We are no longer what blood is to the body  After Tiken Jah Fakoly I They are sharing the world. This same small village of ours, where our fathers erected their huts, & buried their aged. They are destroying the sky we built with our unequal...

    How to write a poem about a mountain On the ridge we stop to catch ourselves, leaning against crags to view the drop. You tell me how you envy my sweeping vistas, my heritage of paths that cut clean through wind. I shush your maundering and press on...

    New York City at night Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in / an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man / a few blocks away, a party spills over the rim of a rooftop /...

    A Philosophy of Light Formed into darkness an octopus squeezes around the spaces of a shipwreck. Light from the bloodmoon reddens the water and the octopus adapts and bleeds. The Earth hadn’t planned to block the sun. The moon can’t help how it affects...

    Dance With My Father after Luther I never danced with my father more so beside him, sometimes across in the clock face of summer dance circles. My father walks backwards better than most walk forward— so whenever he sewed his steps into the living room...

    Jigsaw A family photo, blown up and chopped into a thousand pieces then tipped on the table. We found our eyes first, as they swirled through fragments of black jumper, dark pine trees and an orange sunset sky. The jigsaw became a winter tradition, and...

      Lent As if it wasn’t enough cycling three miles to eight o’clock mass on cold white mornings I stayed in the chapel after the final blessing too early for class in the Colaiste I filled in time around the shadowy stations of the cross the...