Hello

      One touch and you Become it   Playtime in the streets. All of you in a line, behind a Wolf who has his back to you. What time is it Mr Wolf? Four o'clock! He shouts without turning. You let another little girl or boy, too eager for their own good,...

      I Draw a Line of fire and blood, of ants running in horror, a line of broken windows, locked doors, of size four school shoes with shiny bows, a line of thunder and lightning falling into the living room of our so-called home, a line of frightened...

      Nightcrawler Your black eyes, black as the void that surrounds us, stare back at me, so black they catch any trickle of light, the time on the radio, the table lamp, the crack between curtains that let the day in prematurely. They are my eyes,...

      Indoor Cloudspotting Yesterday was leadbellied. Bearing down not floating away. A sense of nimbostratus gathering shadows outside the kitchen windows. You tick the box marked ‘chance of rain’.  We’re classifying drift, tabulating it into neat...

        Two Girls on a Greyhound The older girl turns her face towards the window. Hides behind her curtain of long brown hair. Her sister is asleep. They are never going back there. Stepping off the coach, the seat of the young girl’s jeans is...

      Errata A boy at school liked to collect the broken nibs of pencils: dozens of fractured graphite tines he kept inside a secret compartment in a carved wooden case. They rattled in his bag as he walked: a constant reminder of shoddy penmanship, of...

      fossil fast forward a million years or seven ice cream sticky fingers picking up the shell of me nestled in the sputum on the beach tilting me this way and that looking for angles tracing ice cream fingers through the ess that housed my spine look...

      your flesh is an abacus. i touch every crumb of the morning on you dust it off part you open real slick slow my fingers knead the hard math of you, the science your goosebumps, my abacus beads that substitutes logic. you rosary between my fingers,...

      If I was that woman If I was that woman. If I was that woman in the big house with the tall windows like eyes staring across open farmland where the late afternoon sunset glazes the manicure of her lashes. If I was that woman whose Italian...

      What I Asked of Life When I was six, Life gave me cartwheels, bilberry pie and all of us at the mirror, comparing purpled tongues. From thirteen to thirty I pleaded, Give me a Christian nose, legs up to my armpits. And please, stop me having...

      Mole Understands my Grief She digs into soft earth in search of solace and slugs. I slide into the bathtub below the tidal line. We’re solitary. In enclosed space. Time slips. Down plughole or into soil. My mother ages. I’m dim sighted by how this...

      Colour is Distracting Feel the Prussian Blue pushing against the eyelids. Oxide Green touches the arch of an undressed foot. Raw Umber brushes against the neglected fold of an elbow and leaves a Red Ochre rash. Gold and Silver fill the throat....

      Chutney Music paint the bones of irascible day, braided light, sway of blue mist, island sunrise, yellow bird perches on cordwood, migrant wind, I become a sand house, half-closed eyes, listening to musty ripe poems that hold doors to the last...

      When You Leave, Two Are Leaving One behaves like foreign media: Only notices the events’ cracks, not the water drops hollowing the stones, The ballet school the kids used to go to, its eyes gorged out The dentist’s chair now in the middle of the...

    Mysterious Primates I’ve seen them again – actually not that hard to catch sight, there are so many of them, now. We call them ‘small feet’ because of their prints; their adults’ match our smallest children’s. They wear skins – so little hair – all kinds...

    Hares New born, the leveret hunkers down, this shallow grassy form its only refuge. From the field gate — one careless step away — it faces lowering skies and April deluge. Furred and mobile, leverets grow up fast — once an evening visit from their...

      Chef (i.m. Kevin Higgins) You saw the world for what it was and responded with a flambé of possibility. You saw the charlatans for who they were and knew exactly the combination of spices to season them with before you roasted them. The truth was...

    Circus We are the leave-takers, rolling our hearts in tents. Rootless, our life is soil, any soil. With the first flutters of red we drive a stake in a ground, peg ourselves to the here and now. Harlequin knows the grist of a place, instantly: takes his...