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      big safe knives her greedy hands cook for me slicing limes into such thin wheels ginger honey sesame to steam in this english culture with the least amount of time to cook in all of europe as she eats i touch her hands and feel grease the salt of...

      THE MOTHER TREE Go to the pine to learn of the pine ̶ Matsuo Bashō Spring empties us of snow, spits us winter-lean    Fat gritted rhizomes, our roots upend feeble as sea foamed on rock fast with limpet full dulse.   & we swing sparse growth...

  Hotel Blue (after John Ash) 1. Above each of the sea-facing windows of Hotel Blue, a canopy. At night the smell of fish and vinegar. It’s a good place to fall out of love, fall in love with someone else, a good place to tip out clutter from your bag or pockets....

      I work in a former abattoir code switching like it’s going out of fashion yawns sieved through my terrazzo mouth sunless mornings one bus every hour peopled with rage rainwaxed floors slippery as heritage once I would have cut myself like a...

  Sean’s Ghost leans over the garden wall next the hairpin bend to hand me a rosy apple with the same gesture he himself showed of a stumblebum evening when I was a child making my way home after a bad day at school. Though the apple holds no substance now, and...

  HERONLESS I look for him from the foot bridge    he's not in any of his usual places not mid-stream in shallows           not below the arch under the road not at the corner on a stony outcrop       the fishes are swimming undeterred and the day feels so...

      Second Generation Upgrade I take an invisible dog on holiday to the coast, with raven feather tied to my hair and a new iphone in my bag, my passport is ready for a quick get away, and I must look a sight in these snow-boots and sunset skin. I ask...

          Dane Holt’s poems have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Trumpet, The White Review, Stand, bath magg, One Hand Clapping , Anthropocene and elsewhere. He is poetry editor of The Tangerine, a Belfast magazine of new...

      The Arrow that Flies by Day (Psalm 91) To my first readers I present fragments, half- rhymes, vowels, words, somewhere a metronome beats time and we split the line into syllables, metric feet, then come the myths and metaphors, music sounds near....

      I take a torch to 4am climb the stairs so I can be closer to the moon or Venus, something private, divine Moisture on the roof out of nowhere suggests autumn is creeping in like the possum whose red eyes in the beam are jewels of curiosity or fear...

      Harlan & Siv Euglena Harlan presides at our Church of Gullibility in the Vale, accused of murdering his younger self. Prosecutor Marat Siv arrays testimony, exhibits, arguments against the Judge-Who-Rules-at-Pulpit. During a recess, Siv...

      Auntie Joyce I knew your face when I saw you from the backseat window in the hospital car park where you stood talking to my dad, so I must have seen you before then. Perhaps at your son’s wedding, for you had to be there. I remembered you also...

      Norwegian Trees Still Bear Evidence of a WWII German Battleship According to their research, one tree sampled saw no new growth for nine years after 1945. -       The Smithsonian Imagine a ship pulls up into your fjord and releases a cloud of...

      Coping Because I had a vivid dream I could telephone you in Heaven, somewhere my brain believes it’s true; delusion is a kind of redemption. My conscious mind habituated to our almost-daily conversation, my unconscious has found a line to sustain...

      My Swallows after Ann Gray I talk to the swallows as they dip and dive wonder if they return because of me. I tell them the cactuses are dying, that I'm the wild boar rooting around for grubs, that I don't sleep much these days. I tell them the...

      Toast Ken (now Kenneth) shrugs. He can’t have his liver ripped out after all without his reading glasses. I have Alzheimer’s. Those marshes. I know. Nigel (already regrettable) shares a name with – let’s leave it at that. Sends new guidelines,...