Hello

    New York City at night Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in / an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man / a few blocks away, a party spills over the rim of a rooftop /...

    A Philosophy of Light Formed into darkness an octopus squeezes around the spaces of a shipwreck. Light from the bloodmoon reddens the water and the octopus adapts and bleeds. The Earth hadn’t planned to block the sun. The moon can’t help how it affects...

    Dance With My Father after Luther I never danced with my father more so beside him, sometimes across in the clock face of summer dance circles. My father walks backwards better than most walk forward— so whenever he sewed his steps into the living room...

    Jigsaw A family photo, blown up and chopped into a thousand pieces then tipped on the table. We found our eyes first, as they swirled through fragments of black jumper, dark pine trees and an orange sunset sky. The jigsaw became a winter tradition, and...

      Lent As if it wasn’t enough cycling three miles to eight o’clock mass on cold white mornings I stayed in the chapel after the final blessing too early for class in the Colaiste I filled in time around the shadowy stations of the cross the...

      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...