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    hay sometimes i miss those carefree days of driving around listening to crucial conflict and fucking in funeral homes so i dream of you calling my name in an airport   Sophie Kearing is a writer of stabby words but also warm wishes. Her work has...

    Oracles Each year I am looking for signs, a white pebble, a dropped feather, shy shadow’s shape, red thread burning, how the beans fall in bright patterns, a walnut’s voyage in a silver bowl, sailing a birthday candle through night waters. I must hold...

    KILNER BANK Convolvulus strangles cow parsley and nightshade. Its pure white trumpets plead: Forgive us! Look how lovely we are! Behind the birch trees the hum of industry is punctured by the staccato clack of squabbling magpies. Off the track there’s an...

    Payday Mid-afternoon and the streets smell of petrichor; people spilling out of pubs, crowding to smoke cigs in the early spring sunshine. I am alone, again. All my friends live thousands of miles away. I am closer to the people who are not near me...

  Planet Nine You talk to me intently of black holes. I slip my hand into yours, unnoticed. You are absorbed in thoughts astronomical. I am stealing time. Swallowed by a constellation of brighter stars and suddenly you are on the cusp of the cusp of a place where...

    Night Market   When the night curtain falls, the crowd start to assemble as if drawn by magnets, as if answering a scared call. Neon lights go up along the narrow pavements, illuminating the concentrating faces of food-sellers. Under boiling noodle...

      Ambresbury Banks Early March, after weeks of rain: between a young oak’s leggy roots, a cushion of dun, desiccated leaves. Shadows of other trees all point towards me like the black lances in Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. I sip hot coffee from...

      Burglaries You have been burgled. While you were out with the dog, a burglar made best use of that yawning kitchen keyhole to spook through tracelessly. They were a ghost, floating through your house, with all the time in the world to inventory...

      Cemetery A pity the door is locked. You have to climb in over the fence, which is low in places. A large cemetery, matzevot crushed by falling trees - Tripadvisor review I step through missing bricks. Green graves cluster on a rise under a yew....

      Woof Woof She came growling at me like a wolf, muttering moonlight out of her throat and blood is the future in my skin. No more good girl. She kept moving in her frightened threats, unstable pain swallowed in an unspeakable way. Like me with my...

      The Uncertainty Principle But though she kissed me as a child would do, She clung on a little longer than she needed to. Jake Thackray “The Kiss” Hold a rule beside her measured look. Precisely fix the time it took to meet and break away....

      By Nectan’s Well being unnatural he fixes his sight past the fields of bere and oat and the woods of birch, his goat-eyes watch two worlds at once he knows to boil henbane with bitter vetch so he can see what exiled angels scrawl on the bark of...

    Unbound It was so quiet she could hear her hair grow, heartbeat stretch across measures, nails twist into mobius strips. She unlatched the window so the hair had somewhere to go, tumbling and snarling like water released in spring. He came every day –...

      Making a new picture from another picture I cut a bright patch free sunlit ochre that I loved placed it high up in this picture ditched the grim grounding and from another picture salvaged the russet which had warmed me excised the violet shades...

      Village Mela In one of those colourful stalls A gentle man with golden fingers Carves a wheelbarrow from broken wood With fine wheels and spokes, A toy you hold with string And pull along the village green. You are the owner of the universe All...

      The Fly I’m not looking where the others are seen something closer focus intensely, a relief, maybe just a fly but look notice the gleam of its body how pointed its wings are its comic crooked legs it’s made of many elements a flying saucer for a...

      The poet disregards the soup she reencounters it on the hob at a merry boil not a slow simmer as instructed borscht like bubbling blood melds fingerlings, carrots, onions in garnet guise isn’t it enough that she peeled the beetroot palms, apron,...