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      What I Asked of Life When I was six, Life gave me cartwheels, bilberry pie and all of us at the mirror, comparing purpled tongues. From thirteen to thirty I pleaded, Give me a Christian nose, legs up to my armpits. And please, stop me having...

      Mole Understands my Grief She digs into soft earth in search of solace and slugs. I slide into the bathtub below the tidal line. We’re solitary. In enclosed space. Time slips. Down plughole or into soil. My mother ages. I’m dim sighted by how this...

      Colour is Distracting Feel the Prussian Blue pushing against the eyelids. Oxide Green touches the arch of an undressed foot. Raw Umber brushes against the neglected fold of an elbow and leaves a Red Ochre rash. Gold and Silver fill the throat....

      Chutney Music paint the bones of irascible day, braided light, sway of blue mist, island sunrise, yellow bird perches on cordwood, migrant wind, I become a sand house, half-closed eyes, listening to musty ripe poems that hold doors to the last...

      When You Leave, Two Are Leaving One behaves like foreign media: Only notices the events’ cracks, not the water drops hollowing the stones, The ballet school the kids used to go to, its eyes gorged out The dentist’s chair now in the middle of the...

    Mysterious Primates I’ve seen them again – actually not that hard to catch sight, there are so many of them, now. We call them ‘small feet’ because of their prints; their adults’ match our smallest children’s. They wear skins – so little hair – all kinds...

    Hares New born, the leveret hunkers down, this shallow grassy form its only refuge. From the field gate — one careless step away — it faces lowering skies and April deluge. Furred and mobile, leverets grow up fast — once an evening visit from their...

      Chef (i.m. Kevin Higgins) You saw the world for what it was and responded with a flambé of possibility. You saw the charlatans for who they were and knew exactly the combination of spices to season them with before you roasted them. The truth was...

    Circus We are the leave-takers, rolling our hearts in tents. Rootless, our life is soil, any soil. With the first flutters of red we drive a stake in a ground, peg ourselves to the here and now. Harlequin knows the grist of a place, instantly: takes his...

      Postcard - Untitled   Before Mark Rothko As the floor gives way, I’m a bird always burning up in the desert. Every few years, I tear off my layers. I eat the ashes of predecessors. I’m the torment of cells, neural connections. I’ve learned the...

      Union This marriage was not meant to happen, too hasty,  driven by needing to make everything right.  Late night urge to clean my grandmother's saucepans, to rekindle how it was to be hearthside with her. Too keen and desperate,  now look at the...

      Dangerous Bird She wanted grace. she wanted to feel her limbs lightweight to know flight without wings where light was dim & bass louder than bodies hitting ground. she once saw her body hitting ground purposefully, carefully planned &...

content warning: gynaecological examination     Naming of Parts                                        (after Henry Reed)   Today we have naming of parts.                        Yesterday we had no idea they would need to be named. Two students avoid my...

      Door I opened the door A girl stood there her blonde hair drifting in the wind She said My mother told me not to go to the mountains she said there is nothing to eat in the mountains and she said I will get lost in the mountains and I will slip...

      Diaspora I lost both my lovely uncles one after the other to another country. Jubilantly they had passed their examinations and once equipped with white coats and certificates they poised to join the gloried institutions only to find corridors...

      Melt If a white bear’s weight tilts the floe where once he stood in balance with the ice― If he opens himself to a barely discernible scent of seal but it drifts off like sleet― If a bear pads the asphalt of a seaside town sallowed by streetlight...

      Without you I won’t believe in ghosts but the day after they told me you had died, I saw you everywhere we had been. Not there in that dark garden shed with me as I built a gate, that startlingly first bright day of early summer but in India, that...

      Paper Dolls She did well, my secret twin – kept us alive, deflected blows, absorbed each wound into our body, quiet as a tree. I didn’t notice her leave until the wind whistled in and a bird flew from my mouth. Later I unfolded myself like a chain...