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  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...

      Nowhere to run to What was he running from? Well what have you got: the blood-soaked news of course, theme parks, leaf blowers, HR, but also the language that had somehow begun to seem more violent, more violently banal, more unfit for purpose...

      Queen Conch My spirit animal is a sovereign sea snail. A part-time anchoress, anchored to her cell. Mindful custodian of the tender parts. Chapel of the heart, where fragility is treasured. I distil to flesh and shell. A starfish clambers aboard...