Hello

      Charm Enough of scorch, scald, sore- and rawness. Sometimes flesh longs for eclipse. Mesh over mesh, compact me with cool plaster. Swaddling clothes.  Dry crust.  Sarcophagus. A scratch, a bramble rip... a mere sly snick from a page of your book...

      some fall (inspired by a Radio 4 Tweet of the Day) she told me about the still hours spent at the coast watching the east until finally a spume of feather   blood and effort   rises and approaches blackbirds and fieldfares   a gaunt line starving...

      After the forest fire Because we were four and I only had strength to carry one and knew no other way I carried the one who called out loudest; threatened us most. You two were left to walk behind in the dust of hot, dry summer and the heavy mud...

        The Inspiring As you rummage of a morning among dust-furred personal effects jumbled in an old wooden suitcase under a bed and seeming to belong to no-one, you find a woman about whom the world, if it ever supposed at all, supposed only...

    Lines Written in Early Spring The Lake District Tourist Board has had no input into what you are now reading, but I so miss Cumbria in Holy Week; late March or early April; snow on the tops or a cold sun vying with a cold wind; congregations of chaotic...

      Red as a fairytale Who will pick the apples now she's gone? Orchards of eaters, cookers, some red-fleshed that she’d harvest and lay on racks, then gather those on the ground, struggle down with bag-loads to dump on my doorstep. No note. As if...

      The Girl with Goldfish Under Her Skin She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale. Contours of overlapping knots oblivious to each other and to you – mesmerised by the girl with goldfish under her...

    Cepaea nemoralis A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil in the archangel’s cut brown stalks. Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters, but forget all those frivolous stripey things. These are brittle, open-mouthed vacancies, void of the...

      Notes from the Constanta train station   At the shore of impossibility last moments come to nothing all our plans die in the salt air of another new day on the black sea. There is a sadness in the way we leave the ocean in summer that no cocaine...

      My trans friends and I just want to go swimming in cold water without a thousand eyes watching. to dunk our very own heads under and feel as the breathing world is wiped out. to get an ice cream from a van in the park and watch it drip down the...

      Nothing much It was the snatch of a dream, someone said this is not   what you do in the desert, it was one precise thing, not a list, and I had to find my way back to it. They always ask you now, don’t they, to remember how it felt. I only heard...

      Everything Changes  Goiás Velho, Brazil (for Terezinha Pereira da Silva) We leave early, drive for two and a half hours, park, find the church where you were married. Later, in town, an information officer listens, searches assiduously through the...

      Salem January IV The sky opens Blinking its single slackened eye. It grumbly gets up. Before shuttering again and whatever blue was there Is gone. It’s gone again.     What is there left to say about Marc Janssen? Maybe, his verse is...

      Mother She cut letters out of me, which quietly and unnoticed danced red poems. In the autumn wind, they fell at her feet and rustled decay. Since then, my name wears holes. I counted myself off on five fingers and planted my remains in the...