Hello

      My Lucky Cat My lucky cat waves at me through the day. Supposed to bring in wealth, it brings in none. You’d think that I would know the score by now. I’ve been through many so-called lucky charms. The Lincoln Imp brought me so much ill luck...

      Ritual To Ensure My Safe Return Home In the days before I leave I speak to the cat, explain that I must go away, specifying the number of days that she is to be left in charge. I tell her that she is being given a great responsibility to maintain...

      I Am Back I am back, my love, but much has changed: They have rearranged the waters and carved a holy sink of stone and brought their own memorials which are significant to them alone. But they did not fell the ash tree, being not barbarians after all,...

    Rathke’s Pouch As you read Place the tip of your tongue Against the roof of your mouth Explore the dome And there in the centre at the vertex Is a small pit This is Rathke’s Pouch We all have one But most have never known it Even though the tongue lies...

    Haunting Some houses are full of ghosts, some people can hear all of them but most never notice. No particular reason for it, it’s just different levels of ectoplasmic sensitivity, nothing to do with genetics or upbringing, one of those random...

      When Your Lawnmower Quotes Stalin you know there’s a problem. The easiest way to gain control of the population is to carry out acts of terror as you push your rotary blade Qualcast across an unruly lawn full of the spirit of Spring, this uprising...

      Patricia Marlowe after Nancy Jane by Charles Simic Step-father choking on his sandwich as she died. Hope, the optimist, flying away. Like spectators at a private drama we were, children peering into a fishbowl. In walked a nurse with a trolley. (How...

      The Snow There’s no need to talk about oneself. What’s real is real all over: a sediment of cold — pure cold — is salutary to the warmth, which thought it had the say. You little enzyme-hungry bits and pieces, life-shoots & insects, winding...

      You Are Now Entering Antarctica   When the glacier breaks, we’re sitting down to eat dinner. A large piece of ice beginning the slow move South puts me on edge, evolutionarily speaking. My skin, already white, feels like it’s shimmering like the...

      Being a Mother I look back and ask, how did we get by? Was there too much angling after exactness? Did I promise you something and fail? Unfathomable, the way things become, like winter, a stretch of bare garden. Gone the violets, the brittle...

    The Trickster Talks of her Tears I wake and, for no reason other than life itself, my face feels like it’s made of tears, and they creep along the insides of my eyelids, like rain shifts across a windscreen at speed, but somehow they’re only ghosts of...

      The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place Be secretive - don't make confidences, at most drop hints. Be small bright flowers - peripheral, almost overlooked. Have aliases, a sudden sweet smell at sunrise, a choir in the distance from the warehouse car...

      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...