Hello

    Mind the gap Warm air billows up my legs. If I close my eyes I won’t see Eva Herzigová’s HELLO BOYS HELLO BOYS HELLO BOYS cleavage as I slide down the escalator. My own push-up bra is wonder-less. It performs no miracles cutting into ribs, hiding spaces...

      Our House Where our house should have been there was a hedge obscuring all but the roof from street view where our chimney pot should have been there was a cap to prevent the birds falling in and our souls from escaping where our front door should...

      Collared Doves She calls them beauty and handsome. I see two collared doves, but understand her chosen names. They sit together on the round feed table, pick sunflower seeds like canapes, leave the hemp; every bird leaves the hemp. Today, just...

      Coda The Old Testament There will be a dog, a great stowaway on the dazzle of a Celt’s smokers cough. All spasm and splint, a mollusc of sawn-off sticklebacks for a brambly tongue, licking bad days off the calendar. Dog, a corpse wax witness of...

      Don´t Let Me Sleep I already had visions laced with these encounters; bitumen coffee, sweet-cake pink. Your body spread before me, Oh god! Your long fingers. Let me offer you my still wet hand A slip of love, another creature dying. Tell me I...

      Wager I need coins. Not for my eyes but a wager, a circle of risky bets. Emptying my purse, I find a handful of silver, drum it on the table. And then I dig in, find actual shrapnel. Wounds become currency. Silent mouths gape punctuation. The...

      Antonyms for “Late-Stage Capitalism” I make noises with my mouth, some of which are words. I hold a receipt between my teeth while I take off my gloves and fumble with a keychain. Most of the stuff in my pockets belongs to something that no longer...

      Episodes a moth has swiped a thought right in front of my face a flicker and gone pure cheek the wing brush lingering my eyes scan the walls for pulsing fool’s silver smudges on the ceiling the ghost of a white shoulder bumblebees prey on me...

      Dormouse Summer When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning – how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse. Byron, Journal 7 December 1813 Missing the small...

      A Death (After Tu Fu) The night is bottomless. I can’t sleep. Darkness smells of winter. Stars fade away, beyond my reach, like waves on a distant beach. In mockery the polestar dies last of all. My wine bottle is empty. I can only bow my head. My...

      Demise We had a lovely time At the horror-house. I don’t quite remember When, now, only That it was the last day The flowers bloomed And the bluebells all but rang. It was like attending A colourfully black funeral. There was a bite to eat And...

      everyone’s version of heaven is different i’ve given up self-medicating with fluffy toy dogs and texts from sermonising men who tell me the average person speaks eleven million words a year there isn’t really an average though it’s their way of...

    Weekly ritual Bathrooms were white, in a row, no radox cartons or bottles of Ulay, no toothbrushes sharing a pot on shelves, no trappings of family to wrap round these unparented children not allowed to wash their own hair. And they laughed at Goldballs...

      Détente When I arrived home, the cat was already packing, said she had had enough – if not in so many words – stole a last glance at her coat in the bedroom mirror and left. Not as much as a purr for a week, though we noticed on Whatsapp she had...

      Happy Verges These happy verges in rough grass that claimed us, flowers on the weeds where birds’ nests brim with delicate eggs where all adventures end in fields of germinating seeds while I alone forever wander I would not wish this journey...

      Crux I was dreaming my real self when I woke with a jolt, had just slipped out of my seventh skin was approaching the nub of the thing. Like a chrysalis from ‘Khrusos’ meaning gold and holding S.O.S within it, I was slowly unpeeling my wings,...

      I Keep Dreaming of my Scarab Pendant You know me by my tooth enamel. I am skull, death in gold and malachite, cinnebared by rising suns, blood’s zest. I am woman of silence and feathers, moaning at the king’s touch, screaming to the gods at my...