Hello

      Wax doll From a surfeit of dark you’re wax-cold at the basement window while through the back of the house light filters down the corridor and beyond there’s the garden with banana and bougainvillea and a child under the palm leaves holding out a...

      eden does my world scatter and sprout possibilities every time I take a step? I choose a sapling – it flourishes and flowers, pollinates and I pluck we tumble through the cycles selecting seed after seed I’m trapped in the circle leading from...

      Tip In the evening light at the freezing tip we lug bin bags from the blanket of the car in masked anonymity through tired hi-viz employees, mumbling advice to pallid human figures, barely there, excising months of lockdown trash. I find a working...

    blackhouse when I squat down by a stone wall the moment enters windless broken arms around me naked to the sky filled with a hearth of tree a machair rug when I lose all sense of others as far as           the sea and then some slip down a funnel become...

      Floundering March 1897, a rough winter turns rougher. A mast-gnashing southwesterly disrupts the balance between sea and air. The horizon swirls, then vanishes. Gale-force surges churn up 30ft waves, haul chaos in their wake. Surf froths like the...

      Wild Rufus after Elmore James ‘The Sky is Crying’ Wild Rufus played sax in the Duke of York jamming with Deano in the old tap room. Mostly twelve bars: Muddy Waters, Son House, Elmore James – I believe I’ll dust my broom. I snuck in late with my...

      Bone & Breathless skin is missing liberation & violation usually ends de same way with your DNA lying on someone’s grass in 2005 de soil asked de sky if it could collect me de sky shunted its back peach & swollen de soil made room for...

      Pineapple Upside-Down Cake Sunday. The day I worship at the hob and stove. Unholy music of the kitchen rocks from Spotify, my phone in a Pyrex jug speaker. Sweet Child of Mine. One is out running over the hills, far away from weekend crowds that...

      Just Because all my life I wanted to meet you and because you were late by three weeks and the cocktail I drank while I waited for you to arrive slid down my throat like orange frogspawn while I gagged over the stainless sink and because when you...

      the lover, always sometimes a man wants to come home to an empty house: there’s no dignity in feeling needy in front of others to want to feel / be the hardness of a man i’m a happy drunk but only when i’m alone so the house is empty / my...

      Queen Wealhtheow: Cup-Bearer I watch her pacing the patterned floor, Passing the cup to punch-drunk brawlers, Side-stepping swords, the too-familiar fumble. A mead-hall manoeuvre so mechanical I can tell: she’s done this before. And tomorrow?...

      Deathbed Wisdom The shadow of her arm falls long across the wall. Once, she’d climbed a bald cypress in summer wearing an ivory shift. Once, she’d kissed a stranger in a rainstorm who tasted of bourbon and sea spray. The electric impulse of her...

      RESISTANT That dream again, the one I have Most mornings now: a foghorn calls Across the river’s mouth, I scan The grey salt distance, pick out groups Of oystercatchers, dunlins, knots And, here and there, an avocet, Then turn and take the path...

      ON BEING GHOSTED BY A FAMOUS MUSICIAN Nobody knew he had a glass eye, but when we were alone he’d pop it in and out, like a cuckoo clock, as a sort of intimate party trick. I was surprised by how real it looked, how it followed you around the...

      When You Are Nowhere I only want olfaction in small doses, off my fingers, sometimes it comes when you are nowhere. This is not a joke. I’m going to ride on the back of a lion and sink my hands into his mane, drive my knees into his ribs for grip,...

      Mother Nature She inhabits here laced in hibiscus dancing through marigolds as she weeps low hymns of sparrow’s song fluorescent forests hugging her body while she gayly frolics through a frog pond brushed barefoot as the water hugs her toes she...