Hello

      Clocking off from Sankeys This young man’s veins run with smelted iron. Shift ends. Furnace bellows push him home. He feels for his key in the oil worn bag rummages for fags    wedged between Sketchpad     and empty sandwich tin. Lighting   on the...

      Out Of Bounds   The sweet shop, for starters. Dabs, dibs, Creamola Foam, anything with a fizz. The maids upstairs in their own dormitory, who passed us a copy of Modern Sunbathing. Travelling too far beyond the cricket pavilion, where temptation...

      The calling You’re sitting in the half-light, in a cavern scoured from limestone, on a boulder by an underground stream. Behind: a dark tunnel, too narrow to crawl through, where water flows from, cool and clear. Ahead: heaped debris, the walls of...

      The sisters of stone wend their way in a line one after another the sisters of stone walk across the hollow lake quieten their legs on the dry drowned bridge listening they prayer their fingertips around the cupped whim stones that hold neither...

      Proposal Oh yes, I can still rise with the best of them, sink with the worst. I can play my violin outside your door as easily as spit on your roses. How would you like your jazz? Perfectly syncopated or horribly atonal? I got the sun in the...

      Arpeggio I lie awake. Night presses down my eyes. A blackbird’s song scythes through the gloom, its silver corkscrew ripple reminding me the days are longer now.     Susan Castillo Street is Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor Emerita,...

      The Fisherman King A man who lived alone worked in the city. One day, as he left the building, he heard a kkss underfoot. He looked down. He’d stepped on a crisp.. He sniffed. Cheese and onion. He ignored it and walked on. As he left the coffee...

      Pink Legs I want to be a bird she says Which one? I don’t know A small one With a strong voice One that likes to sing on summer afternoons Long nostalgic notes No, a single long nostalgic note, like sweeeeeeeeeeee That ends in a question...

      Getting Away with It In the hardware store you tuck a chainsaw under your shirt and walk out grinning like a grill. In the pharmacy you glom handfuls of expensive pills and pocket them. In the bookstore you stand and read a book right through and...

      The Gamekeeper’s Son Unfortunately, Julian, you’ve missed the First World War. His history teacher, Mr. Perks, owlish, gentle, self-contained, welcomes him back from his illness. The boy’s attention has to leap from Sarajevo to the armistice. But...

      Climbing the Cage We climb the wire, one leg over the flash of a ‘Hazard’ sign, hide nothing but mums’ words: ‘If police get you, don’t call us.’ Portakabin opens with a chisel. The scatter of drill-bits by the on- switch, squeals of laughter,...

    Pleasant Valley Sunday She’s a breeze beyond my white fence pastel-colored kite tailing behind, a blur of pinks & peaches & as she & her mom pass: we wave like neighbors who don’t know each other’s names. This little girl is six, maybe seven,...

      The Anniversary Every February I remember. I have it marked in my diary and sometimes I take annual leave but that’s not to say I don’t remember at other times - like when a song comes on or I’m buying magazines in the Co op and I’m back in that...