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      Frida's corset after the accident the plaster held her still pasted her straight She reached out her arms for brushes with colour plumed birds and sickles streetcars to live inside with a knife she carved a skylight for her heart    ...

    Clinical Waste For Bev At boarding school, I had no idea what to do with myself.  Most of the time, I hid myself in a paper bag, under my bed, amongst my wash things, beneath my towel and a clean nightie. There were no bins provided and we were given...

      Entropy The margin of the world is blurred – a pale band of light, where sky fades into sea. I arrange my books in order of height, on a bank of cow parsley, amid the random oscillations of a cool breeze and one bee, among the buttercups and...

      HG I know others blossom but I vomit ectoplasm, and squaring the corners of my bed, the nurse reminds me I’m not dying. I’m just expecting an alien that feeds on my nerves because I’m not even exaggerating how much her old school air is grating on...

      Matred After the medieval “Noah plays” of Chester, York and Towneley. Noah’s wife is traditionally not named in religious texts. The name Matred comes from a novel by Madeleine L’Engle. It is known: a woman like that brings evil on board. Look at...

      In the Café Did anybody actually (most of all, me) think I could write here? At a trestle table, notebook blotting crumbs (fast hardening to glue), leftovers of a cartoon transfer, vermilion-tipped cactus tramping down the radio. Heat on the...

      Wrapping Up You have buried your mother and put a memorial bench on a high hillside where the wind blows sunsets straight through and it’s always better to wear something warm. A great walker, your mother. Cities, holloways, rugs by cradles. As...

      Ritual You used to wind yourself in curtain turning taut, look down at your feet, pirouette as the fabric hugged you in. I’d idle as you called me from your hide, and draw the other curtain. And unspooling the fabric as I called your name, you’d...

      Breckland Thyme Deadman’s Grave, 2019 With the rabbit-chapped, seeped the sward along: runner-by-runner the undershrub, shored up, stakes its waspish claim, its hereabouts, blotched with drought & the scar the boot left it, rucks the air with...

      The lesser black-backed gull The gull on the meadow taps her little yellow feet like a shovel-snouted lizard dancing on a floor of lava, a unicyclist balancing on the spot fixated on her singular task. No herring here in the meadow though the sea...

      the word of the Lord ask this place ask the silver day the steady horizon the self-heal the buttercup the hard fern in the ditch ask the bee and the tormentil this rock smooth as an elephant’s back as you sit and watch the breeze stir the surface...

      Unlocked Dogs in spring park light pulled by intent wet noses through luminous grass haven’t read the news didn’t switch the TV on follow only their noses so what do they know     Seán Street’s most recent collection is Running Out of...

      ‘He opens his throat for the crow’ (Matthew Hedley Stoppard) Down the chimney at dawn – crow caw. Wings of night retract. What does it wake me to as sky is hearthed by morning and my home warms slow? Its meaning in my gullet, I learn the way of...

      Last thing he does he dithers round the kitchen, lifts his 12-string from her hook, strikes a ringing rasgueado, the echo bouncing back emphatic from the slate flags and off the marble table. He opens up the draught and gives the creaking stove a...

    How it begins This is how (I like to think) it begins: night-time, August, the Devon cottage, where the darkness is so complete, you might lie in bed, hearing the flit flap skitter of moth wings, fearing their glancing caress against your cheek. Better...

      When Remembering I’m More Than What Wires into Forgetting When naked with myself, I feel where a right elbow isn’t, then is. I let my left palm guide me through the exhibition of my body. I’ve never been here before, or so it seems, as I photocopy...

      Category C bail violation The night of his arrest I climbed a hill to find a deep cave in which to hide as reality reset, such shifts too frequent now, and rarely for the better, an abject pattern emerging, as when raindrops flow across a waxen...

      Dreamspinning As a kid, Nehisi used to sleep in a treehouse. He could curl right into it from his bedroom window. He would have a hard time falling asleep every time his parents got loud or physical. Whatever his parents lacked in romance as a...