Hello

      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...

      Changeling Away over the hills the girl’s father is shapeshifting - grown grey and yellow, wheezing against the pillow’s soft sink, feet that have polkaed and gavotted, tangoed and waltzed vaulting him now, into the submission of the couch. Across...

      the agony of the everyday that blue light these damp pavements will shine and move other people when you’re no longer a memory     p.a. morbid runs The Black Light Engine Room Press. Middlesbrough Historian & Outsider Artist. Married...

      Alphabets of the Human Heart in Languages of the World Ba-dumm, ba-dumm, bam-bam, bank bank, bum-búm, bum-búm, daṛak daṛak, deg-deg, dhuk-puk, doef doef, gup-gup, gup-gup, küt küt, lab-dab, pal-pal, pēng pēng, pil-pil, pilpiri-palpara,...

      the landlady  she moved into the living room so casually no one protested. it’s a chill household, she had said. I lived by it even as the first livid blotches of mould spread up the kitchen wall and death took residence on the couch. I could...

      dis)connecting do not disturb is a phone setting and a feeling as I set out the evening breeze biting my cheek is an invitation I walk until I remember how to find shapes in clouds until I can smell the sweat on my upper lip until I can really...

    Maungawhau Fed up with sitting dormant I shove my legs into compression tights double knot laces and leave the house for the first time in weeks. At the base of Mount Eden I muster the strength to move through its shadow. Pounding against the hard ground...