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      Long Haul In Buenos Aires, the high-rises are built with stacks of premium steak, while in Patagonia, the killer whales like to beach themselves, Tuesdays at half-past four in the afternoon to play a game of pat-a-cake. Bake me a cake, as slow as...

      Major Arcana No. XXI: The World  You could believe the all is dancing somewhere where the body is not bruised, where hearts are glowing like an earthrise, where all time and time’s losses, all wrongs are resolved in the golden snake that winds...

      From The Last Divided Capital In The World Childhood memories of sandbags, and barrels against barbed wired brick walls barricading the way to the unknown. The spoken of in choked up breaths. Displaced throats echo into mouths born generations...

      A part of my body is dead, hardened and now so hard you could use it as a door knocker or the beak of a woodpecker; it has turned the soot of Black Death, of Shanghai smog; I want to crack a nut on it like a squirrel, parched walnut brains waiting...

      Prised Apart   I raise my arms and let them slump back down. Maybe they don’t belong to me. Our movements more exhausted, looser Did we show rage. Did we try for once to rest your hands on your hips, hold yourself like a good china cup chipped as...

    The Old Fishing Village The rain is a gauze. I could have slept in, but listen to gulls bothering the cruise ships. What more can rain throw at us? Joe’s boat slips out once a day for weather-beaten tourists who find us on old maps. The yellow houses on...

      Wasp’s Nest I wanted to be a goat when I was a child. Agile and cloven- hooved. My days were spent poking cowpats with a stick, sending clouds of bluebottles into the hot sky as the hay meadows chirped with crickets and grasshoppers. One evening...

      The New Owner Meets The Duende in the Old Barn Last night, in the stone barn behind the house I met a duende, knee-high, Bigfoot stomping, Spluttering gobbledigook. ‘What’s your problem, Duende?’ I asked. Perhaps a touch Patronizing. ‘You, you,...

      Evening Lists Inadequacies unreels our slippages. My daughter             kaleidoscopes supermarket-aisles              in the apartment lift monotone. Squirrelling through     the doorway, she pictures what to; I don’t....

      Weekend Work Do Tina and I are circling the room at speed wrapped in white table cloths. Who knew this was what we came here for? We are tiddly after a day of contributing — to workshops in small groups, structured chats on the sunny lawn — by...

      Getting Somewhere We don’t admit to depending on the brakes too much. But the garage tells us we need to change the pads again. We don’t enjoy brinkmanship, but our new tyres have already started to lose their grip. We don’t want to crash, we’re...

      Broken English When I was younger, for a long time I assumed that being an immigrant, I could not fully understand or Enjoy English verse, wrote Elif Shafak, novelist, last Saturday In The Guardian. There would always be Something I would miss...

      Sainsburys, Chertsey. 3:30. Friday Our heads close, we walk the length of a hundred recounted steps, our time ghosts frequenting a town we have come to pace and slumber, maybe dance in. I watch the back of your head and the way the wind cradles...

      Carboot Every scratch from every needle is hidden inside these sleeves – the scars off inadvertent drops from when a certain personal hit was needed – carried around in square bags worn as badges accumulated on Saturdays browsing Eastern Bloc,...

      The day job gave me a recurring dream on a frozen lake circles of ice were cut using giant hacksaw blades. Telling them I couldn’t swim as they smeared oil onto my shaking body was ignored. See them struggling placing me under the water chanting...

      Boy and Stick In the old black-and-white photo he’s still up that tree in the park, a shape among branches, a kind of negative space, detectable only by mathematics and his pull on other objects. In shorts. Moustache of milk. Scabbed knees. Coins...