Hello

    The Cutters It's the clatter I hear first of metal tooth biting down scything sharp through the wildings. The most stupid way to die is flaying by hedge cutter. So I wave my arms and jump and the two farmboys with grins like soldiers pause the grinders...

      I Claim This Sky All winter I have kept vigil on these lichen-licked branches, compacting myself like stone. I’ve laid out the bones of my dead, glued my bloodied edges back together, shredded my pages and fed them to the wind – a lost language...

      Watching the Dead It’s how you remember him most. Under the lampshade with no sound, cobalt slip-ons angled by the chair, hands white as plugs (he’d always question the purpose of winter). It’s how you remember him most. Paints in a fossil box...

      Finishing Touch God chars the edges of the day, the sky turns the colour of the sediment at the bottom of a bottle of cheap orange squash. I imagine it like tea-staining paper to make replicas of old treasure maps as a kid. I remember burning the...

      Once it’s gone, it won’t come back Go to your fields And go to your fen. Go to your tiny Patches of scrub. Breathe the green Whilst it lingers still. Go to your trees And breathe in their bark. Feel the ground undulate Free of concrete. Look to...

      The Change I wasn’t going to come to the party but you threw bright covers over the noisy magpies who were pecking all the grain – there are still scratch marks on the carpet where they learnt to dance the watusi whilst pretending to be hip. And...

      She Lives Alone She lives in the 6am coffee before the alarm, before school. The light on the water on her skin in the shower, in the way her feet are then young and familiar on the tiles, childlike in their delightful lace of bubbles. She lives...

      Minimalist you play me Philip Glass on video call behind you I see trees in motion stopping and starting as the connection wavers the green fronds repeat the same movement minutely varied and the music builds its slender momentum there is so much...

      grey pennant [as taken from Dulux Paint] speaks easy. vomits up love, that pigeon wing cootie catcher. how easy – run of garlic like a spat-out oyster on bruschetta. I snap the necks of all the men in my life and they fizz. fluster out like the...

      Duplex: Horses after Jericho Brown Horse running wild through post code black spots hooves ringing out through sink bin streets echoing through the ginnel, the red brick streets my last address I saw wild horses my last address, horses, horses,...

      Molehills Moles, my neighbour calls through a hole in the hedge the day we move in – we’ve got moles. I jump up and down on their molehills, he says. Doesn’t do any good, but it makes me feel better. Bin day’s Thursday – black bins this week,...

        Traffic Your name kicks my arse nearly as far as the roundabout where Jenny and Kim lounge on the grass trying to get a tan. Fate gave them their pasty skin, or their parents did anyway, emoting shut-eyed karaoke in the snug of their local...

      Does it hurt? You were lying when you said it wouldn’t – the measles vaccine, the own brand tampon, rows of dead jellyfish on Dyffryn beach. Leaving that place to come home each summer, leaving home at the end of that summer and never coming back....

      In a moment of absence The road whispers in a language not heard these seventy years the sea eats only its pebbles and can be heard calling its kinfolk who listen can listen now the sea can be heard and all the candy floss falls strangely silent...

      Back to Work This morning I made eye contact with myself for the entirety of a 48-minute video interview. My manager asked me where I see myself in five years’ time. My Mum says I am careless. I forget to switch off the hob, walk around with my...

      ’Twas a long summer of thin air after Vera Iliatova’s ‘Cruel Month’ (2010) Of a drier Sahara. Of the sun living late into the nights; waking before dawn. Of cattledeaths and heatstrokes. Of brown cities in a gas chamber. Of distant, trailing...