Hello

      Nothing much It was the snatch of a dream, someone said this is not   what you do in the desert, it was one precise thing, not a list, and I had to find my way back to it. They always ask you now, don’t they, to remember how it felt. I only heard...

      Everything Changes  Goiás Velho, Brazil (for Terezinha Pereira da Silva) We leave early, drive for two and a half hours, park, find the church where you were married. Later, in town, an information officer listens, searches assiduously through the...

      Salem January IV The sky opens Blinking its single slackened eye. It grumbly gets up. Before shuttering again and whatever blue was there Is gone. It’s gone again.     What is there left to say about Marc Janssen? Maybe, his verse is...

      Mother She cut letters out of me, which quietly and unnoticed danced red poems. In the autumn wind, they fell at her feet and rustled decay. Since then, my name wears holes. I counted myself off on five fingers and planted my remains in the...

    Annette's Ode Slithering through incisor-gap, English leapt from your lips to mine, a string between you & me, ringed with hot coals we slide back & forth in the air like abacus beads. Coals that warm & warn: lighting the way as best they...

    How It Ends There is an album of all the men your mother have loved. It sits every night in the deep silence of the basement. Tonight, your mother burns the album, she pours fire into her longing. Every memory carries a flame, every man with his own ash....

    Great Depression If they ask where I am, tell them: I am wintering. I have secreted small acorns of sadness in crevices of gnarled limbs and shall be savouring their bitternesses on the back of my tongue until the days lengthen. But mainly, I’ll be...

    the universe in her face she said she was a teller of stories her name was elspeth, elspeth davie it was so strange to meet her in the dark tunnel beneath the liffey cold we were, the both of us coatless and unwashed a hot shower would be delicious she...

    You always ate oranges I am peeling an orange at the end of something At the end of a line from each time you took up the fruit Dug your thumb in, hooked out a chunk of skin Pulled pith from flesh from round heralding its colours so loud no one could...

    Mum’s Skull Contains a Vacuum Cleaner Every five minutes it does its job, hoovers every inch of her memory, declutters all pains and sorrows. It booms, roars, heats up, leaves no space for nostalgia. When I ask her if she’s had dinner, she says she...

    The Work of Hands And once the father frowned As the boy struggled to fasten The drawbridge on his fort. ‘He’ll never be any good With his hands’ he declared, As if the boy wasn’t there. And once he beat the boy For palming a Dinky toy His mother refused...

    Afterlife Perhaps the friends of Lazarus, who died and slipped his shroud, on seeing him might swoon or rush to hear the tales of that beyond they hoped and feared to face. Perhaps some cried or shook and got themselves quite drunk by noon. Or had the...