Hello

      Fish at the quarry I usually hide Fish in my stomach, let it flip away angrily in the acid, or else I stuff it in my pocket, where it gets all woolly and dry, and goes still. Today, I take Fish to the quarry, let it stew in me as I gaze out over...

      The Pea-Sheller of Crab Street She’d be out there all hours, half past three, two minutes to midnight, shelling peas on the front doorstep, always impeccably scrubbed. The pop of the shuck and the plip of the peas as they dropped into the chipped...

      Picking Them Up at the Hospital My daughter, son-in-law struggle to strap their newborn into the car seat    pulling the seat belt across, under and back, tying a knot, trying           again. My daughter chastises her attentive husband who can't...

      Any Excuse You won’t find him in there, says Alan Shea as the policeman flips the freezer flap in the fridge looking, they say, for INLA escapee Mad Dog Magee in such an unlikely haven — the home of a Manx gay rights campaigner with a telephone...

      AWAKENED BY THE APPROACHING GARBAGE TRUCK WHILE DREAMING OF DU FU First moments of dawn immersed in song of many-voiced birds. From behind the house I wheel the bin to the still dark street. On sky’s rim colors appear that have never been named. I...

      Today is Tomorrow I remember this from before, a sudden plane hoovering up the sky more energy than a wasp its direction is its excuse – a new war somewhere. I stand on the fresh autumn grass as the thrumming plane disappears thrusting into space,...

      EYEWITNESS OF THE INVISIBLE A homeless moon lingers over the town. I linger with it, both of us bracing for single combat with oblivion at the crossroads where silence is spoken. I was interrogated once again during the night but betrayed only...

      #mahsaamini Today I want to be loud and clear and round like an O or hold my gun like an R and live in Revolution I ask the words as I chant them to slip into curves and folds of my body and rise with me Today I'm as woman as possible here's my...

      Then After a time of fires in oil drums, eddies of dog packs where the hospitals had been, first histories were published elsewhere, first conferences counted the spent cartridges. Wildflowers meantime came straggling back to cover the poisons,...

      My Albatross and Me my albatross is an over-stretched suitcase spilling out stuff I must remember my albatross was small but she grew like Topsy now she will not fit back in her box my albatross is a story, a black and white movie, a steam train...

      Containers From on this cliff top, I can clearly see the quarter-mile-long ship across the bay, a dark shape of unseen complexity. I am a sack of bags, with tubes that go between them, and with fine wires everywhere. I am the mind that feels this...

      Rapprochement (Glosa)             Maybe it happens one night, driving             Through an unknown suburb, the realisation             That nothing is going to change, the time             Will never come for explanation – Too Late by Ruth...

      Into the Forest Some of the liveries…are of people who do service so that they receive them as wages, such are the custodians of the palaces, the guardians of the royal temples, the pipers, the seizers of wolves… The Dialogue of the...

      Muscle memory I cut up my plaster cast and buried it deep into the earth. Mystics say if you offer pain to the natural world, it will heal what’s left behind. I prayed out loud when the wind howled and rain cleansed me of grief.  Now it seems my...

      Morton’s Laws Think me not a pessimist, Or, for that matter, a cynic. But my First Law (I don’t Care a fig for Newton) states: If it makes sense it will not Happen. The corollary states: The more sense it makes, The less likely it is to happen....

  Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, who has published ten chapbooks and collections, and loads more interesting stuff with other people. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.