Hello

      How to Walk to the Sea Follow the footpath past the farm house dodging mud and deeper ruts Pass through the bent and rusted gate the ford choked by balsam and reeds At the first stile look up to the horizon vast grey sea, the buzzard. Ignore the...

      Control Imagine a box, body-sized and you’re inside. You can stand. Cramped. Just. That’s where I lived and had to lug the thing around with me everywhere I went. Imagine having a voice torn out as the words exit. Ideas choke, when there’s too...

      My Mother Welcomes me to the Care Home Come and live, we'll find you a house, you'll have an old time and be loved. You can just sit there, don't lick a finger, there's ups and there's dugs but we've got to go nowhere. They take us in so we can...

      Disabled Person’s Travel Card Council, council, let me on the bus That you let me on last week. Oh no Ms Watt, you can’t go on the bus For we don’t know where you live. So off I went to get proof of address And I thought I’d sorted out the mess...

      Testing times My bones scold-heavy, heartsick I drag my eyes anywhere - to the funeral wax of lilies, to the boastful damselflies confident in their beauty. I refuse to look at, to acknowledge, that Chair, waiting to test. Solid. I won't watch the...

      A movement of flutes I'm rushing. the beer shops all close here at 10pm sharp (that’s unless you're already in them). I've been eating dinner at my parents’ tonight – with my brother and sister and both of their wives. now it's 9:45, and I've made...

      nocturne a note lingers a forward echo from an ancient song the lone woman on the long road carries it on with imperfect pitch a gate opens a door opens she is gone a continent away a man well-versed in parting words hums a tear into his own eye...

      A Scripted Life Each day the play starts over, you making sure you’re not the protagonist, that yes, you’re listed in the credits but not under this name, or any name you might give to be scrawled on the side of a paper cup by a barista to avoid...

      Foresting Grannylou steps into the forest and a thousand Grannylous greet her. A mess of baby Grannylous roll along the forest floor, plum-cheeked and pawing at squirrel tails, giggling at twenty-something Grannylous who slot themselves into...

      Ceres in the garden You wring yourself from me a sort of ripening a size-of-fist fruit pome trailing smashed seed juice you slip from my palms, lovelike my plum pudding prismatised in the light in your soft proto-placental such brilliant viscera...

      peter lacy you beg me to saturate you    like oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber    just a whiff of torso a lungful of animalic notes    my bones smell smoky & powdery against yours    don’t magnetise yourself    I prefer you smaller than a nail...

      When an albatross crash-lands in a dream Long ago I saw an albatross fly head-first into a dream so fast so hard it penetrated half a mile deep. Inside the crater a wreckage of feather and bone remains which over millennia became this fossilised...

      Post The days that follow, we both receive from you a letter. Jane’s was waiting in a bleary mailbox shuttered with snow, having crossed westbound while she hurried east. You couldn’t wait for spring. Mine was older, slipped with a tenner in an...

      Gentrification Remember when hell was a thing? You could look it up in Dante, or better still in a history book you could extrapolate from The Geneva Convention. Remind me the tell you the story of the middle manager who unironically, referred to...

      Lost is the Story Everyone loses their time at the same rapid speed—it’s like flying shrapnel, or a quickly strobing light. We’re all moving into another life, another dying. The oceans feel it too— and every tree churns quietly in its center with...

      Mrs Hitchcock Takes a Bath I’m not so sure about showers — if you must know it’s the sound how it rushes, pounding, drowning everything and, dear, sometimes — I know it’s probably only the pipes — but sometimes it screams so I’ll just take a bath...