Hello

      Before the market town with the Pepper Pot building and the concrete bus station and its standing water, we were Hampshire, Beirut and Freetown with neat shelves of Vimto, ivory, Milupa, of Milton, tie-dyes, pink almonds and sugarcane. I picture...

      In the Line Up It's beginning to rain. Just drizzle now but who knows what that portends. And there's no shelter. But at least we're moving, slowly to be sure, but forward. "What's this line for?" I ask the guy in front of me. Not that I'm curious...

      A Present for Cat If I could send you the perfect present it would be a box with the words DELICIOUS VICTORIA SPONGE CAKE on the front and when you  open that box it would reveal another box with the words FEROCIOUS SCORPION!!! written across it...

      Everyone Welcome I sit at the back of class, behind rows of people in padmasana. Legs crossed on their mats. I stay in my chair. I’m not everyone. I haven’t taught anyone in a chair before, says the teacher. I assume you know what you’re doing....

      Lunchbreak She slips away from fire and steel, each dip of the paddle a balm for tension at the surface. She steers a course beyond the rocks, slow in the heavy water that still smarts with April’s chill and with the poise of someone at ease with...

      The Ultimate Question    the best answer is from Bob Mortimer and 2 Babybells he transmogrified their red wax coats with a flaming serviette, winding a wick as a beacon light with pocket cheese to sustain you during the realisation that many...

      Shasta You can stand on red banks like a brilliant tree Breathe toward the summit; You can descend like an avalanche. The mountain will not reject you The mountain might eat you alive But it will not reject you The mountain might turn you over The...

      A Cell My heart, that scrappy little jail and inside it, you sitting there dejected growing more yellow and gaunt by the day. (I saw your thing on Instagram.) I would like to release you, but can’t the doors don’t work that way. If there is a key,...

      Binge drinking  Sometimes I distract myself, watch Svankmajer with the family, or walk like Robert Walser, conversing cheerily with crows; but the news still bubbles madly under bouts of fierce bad skin, bursts forth in pints of wine and whisky...

      Blue Lilies The blue lilies celebrating my pregnancy I placed in a vase of blue-wash pottery. A sweet force had somehow swept through the gristle and splinters and sediments and sticky bubbles of my polycystic ovaries. I told her stories, lots,...

      Floors of Vapor Plover inside a crocodile’s mouth, blinking the clouds from its eyes. Doing nothing is difficult.     Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books),...

      Liminal   Before he died, he saw his parents more and more, not that it bothered him, he said, there was nothing untoward going on: they didn’t gesture him to follow nor loom at his bed in the care home; they went about their ordinary lives,...

      Neuroleptics There goes the man with the paper face stretching his arms for takeoff, his cloak flapping  open for flight. He knows every twig in these wooded grounds. He can float above every tree. Above him red squirrels chase each other across...

      Imagining Green   The leaf is the paradigmatic form of openness: life capable of being traversed by the world without being destroyed by it (The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture. Emanuele Coccia.) I was imagining green light like two...

      Tawny Owls I’ll take your owl, Paul, and Sylvia’s and raise you two, that call across the meadow on August nights; male and female: one twit, the other twoo. I won’t say which is which. No, I haven’t seen them, haven’t risked my bald pate, don’t...

      Newgale You stand at shoreline watching. Unaware the tide advances, despite decades of life by the sea, you dip your toes in icy Atlantic swell. But decay has arrived as a rip tide – pulls you under, drags you out into the bay. The men throw a...

      Plantation blues Morning light is warm quicksilver on the desert plateau of the high Monadhliath, bare stone and scoured earth the seed of man and winter. The upward flow of pines is genesis not rewilding, redcoat drumbeats on the drove road still...