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      Dead-spit   My father kept what little he had of my mother in a drawer. It branded his next wife as second. She tipped the contents onto a fire she’d lit in the garden – photos with deckled edges, wedding pictures in card sleeves, snaps of my...

      Medlar Jelly This is going to be a pre-Raphaelite poem about the fruit of the medlar tree that grows in parterres by the West Wing. They leave the fruit long on the tree so that it can blet (good word) to its heart’s content. Then the gardeners...

      Dead Graham Amuses Himself Dead Graham stands in the doorway eating a family pack of Tyrell’s crisps my crisps Dead Graham isn’t a ghostly thing ghosts were at least alive once he never was Who’s had all my vintage Cheddar? Dead Graham smirks from...

      Hiding is hiding First it takes away ‘the’ indefinite from your mouth. Then it is its own skin. Space on walls where it used to hang. Edges of time’s slow camera flash burnt like a castle’s kitchen bricks. Then in cracked cards of a book binding...

      Physics of sound It’s on the attack; though I turn away it still marches into my head its most effective ambush is from silence a click, a drip, sudden creak, then gone but it can bounce like an acrobat then bounce again.. again.. again strokes my...

      Early Morning Someone spread these crumbs in the dark An off-white offering for city crows Shredded bread like snowflakes in the blackness Caught by the neon glow of the MAXOL sign Where men have begun their work by now Washing metal, checking...

      The House where Courage Lives That night I spent every waking hour staring at my face in the mirror in the darkness. It was the first time I’d looked myself in the eye. In the morning I removed the guard from the fire of my heart, gave careful...

      History Here vineyards spill beyond an autumn hill, each vineyards's grapeleaves a different red or gold, geometric as Cezanne, the arc of the sky a long blue neck by Mondrian. What if the earth breathes its seasons as though alive, for when...

      Visit Now that I am here, it’s clear. What I wish for you, Lydia, is that you will be washed up naked and alone on the shore of the Phaiakian’s island, not in this white space with locked doors and that blank-eyed doctor armed with a pile of...

      The Virgin Mary Is Crying I am thirteen and leaving our house as breath haws out my mouth. When I breathe in hard me nose burns. Hands are dead, fingers tender as if they have been burnt. Hunched shadows hit the work trail; they close gates...

      Winging It He loved his pigeons, almost as much as serving his Lord. He would attend to them when his other flock were grazing on life. He’d gurgle along in the loft, ministering to their needs before the race. Setting the clock as they were sent...

      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...