Hello

    Let that love show When all is quiet save for the silky rustling of an autumn breeze let that love show. When your patience is darkness-dappled and as weary as an exhausted scholar let that love show. When you’re disappointed to learn that trestle...

    Red Kite Mrs. Hooping helped with my coursework since Mr. Smith lived on pizza boxes. Found rocking a dead pigeon on the cardboard, now he's back at his mum's, auditioning to be a postman. Witnessed a Red Kite in my underwear drawer from our session in...

      I want to wake up like they do in films   no puffy eyes that blink to find the dawn foreclosed again behind those wretched blinds you bought but sunlight streaming in through impractically curtainless windows; my skin, made-up in golden...

      Poem for my Father Come away Simon, away to the woods with us. Leave your shoes by the stairs and follow our feet to the bridge. The dog is scared of the burn so won’t bite your fingers when you cross. We can sleep in the treehouse and wait for...

    In My Hand I Hold Two Truths I make broth, feel odd wiping it off your face moments after swiping through bodies, preferences, dates. Sunset-orange forget-me-nots mar the napkin cloth I dab along your stubbled jaw. If forget-me-nots bloomed blood orange....

      Paysage Moralisé There's more to this three-foot square: lilac vetch & vermilion field-poppies, some sort of crucifer spreading its yellow legs for an evening damp enough to be hot; opposite, big-box retail, facing away to heavens dreamt...

      Saint Brendan Brown limpets with tonsured heads creeping over the fish-stink isle, spongy underfoot, seaweed for grass. At the head, fire-crowned Brendan his feet licked by waves, knows tidings odd. Is it word from God, or knowing the wrinkled sea...

      A Taste of Apocalypse Such stillness in the air. The attic window is a cupped ear set to alert the house to subtle shifts in atmosphere: auguries; signs; any tiny notice of cataclysmic change. All it amplifies today is a lone jay’s irritated...

      What Part of Me? Sun demands a front row seat above the graveyard through the trees when my mother’s placed in soil, surrounded by her friends’ small talk – She must have sent the rays for us. Women in their Sunday best, men in greying suits...

      Amphibian Land has dried its eyes, grown hard hands and interrogates each arrival: Where are you from, really from? Are you skinlight, sunhatched, from beyond the serried trees? Answer these. The borders are closing. I wear a different skin,...

      Losing It after Yehuda Amichai If we think we are right the sun may never set; if we know we are right then beasts could take our place; if we say we are right the towers will always fall; and if, after all after all we've thought, known, said and...

      Things I did then that I hadn’t done before Asked the neighbours if they wanted anything in my online weekly shop and Bought yeast, flour, long-life milk and 70-per-cent-alcohol hand sanitiser and Cut my own hair, even the bits round the back I...

      Quiet, Elizabeth Elizabeth is hiding in the cupboard under the sink Small enough to fold between cream cleaner and floor polish Too big to keep elbows away from wire wool Knees away from the slick puddle of the U bend Nose away from the liquitab...

      Acts of Repair Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? (Tupac Shakur) You wouldn’t believe how quick they grew — Our babies were men now. Lifting bags of concrete they rebuilt cities, slab by slab, reinforcing cracks....