Hello

      The Last Days Of The Giraffe She stared down from her beige towerblock onto an alien plain: zig-zag of roofs, wingless cranes, zebra crossings and a sea of litter - the new neighbours behaved like bushpigs. Once she used to hoof it down the Thames...

      When they go they will still text you give an unexpected call keeping it brief, before a meeting but the phone is dead and it is the first time I have used that word. You will still shout up the stairs ring the bell there is no-one there key...

      Cloudage I see you. Like me, you’re misshapen; a swamp in a dwelling. We merge; a suture quivers through us, the way nightmares take long strides on still waters. We’re camping under the mellow lilts of our alibi; the breath checks out.  ...

      Hungry Ghost In Hinduism a Hungry Ghost (or Preta) is fed rice so it can reincarnate. Write prayers for the dead today, feed them rice balls, they see only three children, say there is another one somewhere, knocking on the outline of a womb,...

      Clubbersize At ten am, kids safely dropped off at school, we swarm to the club, slurp into neon Lycra, elbow our torsos through womb-tight tops, fold tums and pull bums into leggings that squish like a grope in the dark. As studio lights dim, we...

  Affirmations I am healing. I am the cumin seeds. I am loving again. I am cardamom. I am breaking generational curses. I am black pepper. I am prosperous. I am salt. I am wealthy. I am the simsim seeds. I am beautiful. I am sugar. I am reclaiming myself. I am...

    Bite Marks I had that dream again, the one where we gnaw holes into the skin of all the people we have to love. And it got me thinking, what would happen if we had to wear our feelings through our fingers, and every last tip of them had to grow as a...

      Self portrait as Blackpool I am towering tall enough to ride The Wild Mouse. A cockle-hearted donkey named for a flower that doesn’t grow in sand. My bridle is so pretty, red with tin bells but my sea is impossible always out of reach or crashing...

      Being Changed I am sap breathtake sound of another day a little door swinging with breezes looking for a superpower in this implacable taxed body like all our devices sending signals emojilike to impossible objects thinking we shall be changed in...

      Sand Angels Sand angels are ghosts we make while still living— giant stick birds all wings and no feet     Gordon Taylor (he/him) is a queer poet who walks an ever-swaying wire of technology, health care and poetry. His poems have...

      Waterlogged In the tight clench of hormone-drunk years the shape of skin and skeleton just sinks your flooded self, all bogged with life’s full stops and every-day disaster. And so it seems the house is porous – our bricks that promised...