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      Old Empress Inside, in the half-light, the iron rot took hold. Forgotten service–obsolete. Salt-coin neglect. The money flowed inland, Moored on an hourglass choke. No one told the sea. Orange hull still bright, Empress her name- cracked white...

      Down the Dank Way Out of morning a misted light, glowing fire in the air. Bare trees, frozen. A paling sky. The ground’s hoary pelt. Dark river, whisps of vapour on its surface, like wights stalking the remains of night. Craig has had poetry,...

      SPORTS NEWS A very long time ago Stephen Fry’s godfather, the Justice, Sir Oliver Popplewell Who chaired the inquiry Into the Bradford City Stadium fire that killed 56 football watchers, contrasted The quiet dignity of those relatives With the...

      A Thumb-Sized Sinbad under My Armpit Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb. His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb. Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone— Singing, Cracking jokes,...

      Divining In the portacabin that morning, men smoked and looked at last week’s paper again. There was no water to fill the urn. The first job – to get connected to water and power. A slow hour went by of dirtied cards landing on the table. I was...

      Napsack A blustery day – the wind too strong for kites or for lifts to the sky. “To a thoughtful spot,” it cites and pins me to the earth. A dragonfly perches atop a little asphalt hill but zips off when the hill twitches and sniffs the air....

      I Cast Out Everything except this burnt red vase. Hand shaped in the muffled roar, devouring flame in the furnace’s mouth. Sand becomes skin of light. Its glass body trembles like a sea animal remembering its salt. I hold the lagoon’s sigh,...

      Under The Plum Tree Look, Drew, the plums are in pieces beneath us. I dreamt: you let the sweet ones rot at the bottom of your pocket, sagging like the canopy. Hannah is thirty feet long in a field of dandelions, waving...

      Night Out a flower is not a heron does not stand on one leg spear-billed over golden carp does not rise on wide wings neck curving into the blue flight like a slow heartbeat a heartbeat is not a flight does not lift a wary body translate a girl...

      Chant after Ammar Aziz At dawn and dusk, my father becomes a chant, that flies above the courtyard of the old house by the river, where only the men recite Sanskrit prayers by lamplight, as though in a divine trance, to Gayatri, consort of the...

    Wake The leaves are a colour you’ve never seen but that I will learn to expect and there’s a fracas-induced full moon, clouds beneath like soot from giant candles. I woke up and the time ahead was missing like Notre Dame’s gothic power and the spots gone...

      The Basement  The way a halved peach breathes, then rots from the inside out. Her tongue, a swollen garden of secrets. The corners of her eyes reach toward her burning shoulders.     Clara Howell is a poet born and raised in the Pacific...

      Prometheus Burns Down The Last Bar Of The Pub Crawl Out of ten bars, by the fifth, half of us had flickered out and by this ninth one, it ended up just him and me. A matchstick balanced on a stool, he sat trench-coated and ember-tense. Salt from...

    A Fistful of Cake Loaded with hawks’ cries and horses’ huffs Ennio Morricone’s score wails as the camera narrows on cakeslingers’ squints. Eli Wallach’s, Clint Eastwood’s, and Lee Van Cleef’s hands tremble near leather holsters. Eastwood chews the...

      Eating Apple Pie with Louisa May Alcott When the genie appears, I’m in a frivolous mood. First request? My mom’s apple pie. Genie, exceeding expectations, delivers it hot. As steam rises from slits in its cinnamon dusted crust, I cut two slices....