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    This Thing Called Loss a boy grows tired of dying again and again.                                                                                                                                        i am building him a morgue                          ...

    Skyscrapers Raining Paper Again, in one of those dreams where the cityscape is now razed though in a way that’s familiar, in a fugue state, my dream-eye knows: this is how it’s been. The hearts from the heart-shaped hole punch are scattered on the...

    The Things We Carry We carry the scars of Section 28 that were stitched into our skin during lunchtimes dodging fists and after-school ambushes behind the bike sheds, where onlookers’ cheers drowned out the blows. We carry the silence of Clause 16...

    Horticulture for the Transcendental Age It’s the ghost of my mother again, glow-handed, and draped in the hair she cut off before I was born. She is cradling an aspidistra, or what could, indeed, should be and aspidistra, because of course I have no idea...

    Fugue at 2:17 a.m. The fridge clicks its cold heart. Outside, foxes yowl like their throats are made of gravel and old songs. This hour does not require a name. It is known by its absences: no text reply, no sleep deep enough to soften the inner stammer....

    when we moved from morecambe out of the garage dark whose door we raised with a thimble of power                           before the spring kicked in like how our mothers’ mothers brought light to fading eyelids with smelling salts we sniffled to the...

    Granules in the Hourglass Syllables cascade through time, granules in an hourglass, to recombine, cohere into a word, a phrase, poetic line. Language reinvents itself, coruscates in signs on walls; falls silent, mute as clay and stone on tablets that...

      …tell it slant The river is an old demon & my heart is an infirm creature The river is sure of its way & my heart is capable of lies. The river is incapable of lies & my heart is beating,  beat on beat. The river flows from high to low...

      everything i love is out to sea glass-tooth morning. salt mouth. i left the stove on just to feel wanted. the sea wrote back once— in lowercase. smudged. untranslated. i drank it anyway. // the sun fell behind me like a dog you didn’t name. didn’t...

    To no one After you deleted your profile, I had no number. No email. No name to search. Just a blinking cursor where you used to reply. Still — I kept writing. Sometimes just: “Hi.” Or “Would you have answered today?” Or “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Or...

      Releasing My Stays Inside my bedroom I take a fresh blade pull off my jumper, examine the ladder in front of the mirror cut through my laces rung by rung, watch my grey marbled flesh emerge from its carapace, fold by fold. I'm letting go, I’m...

      That’s when she went to ground, after she disobeyed, painted her plastic tea set red, hidden away in the playhouse they built down where bindweed draped, where people not like us lived behind the hedge, heard but not seen, that’s where she went to...

      All of it It’s thirty-four years since you let go and we were pulled on downstream, a Sunday then too. My brother texts me: remembering happy times with father. Yes, but how to separate them from the rest, and do I want to? You and I have had many...

      Tidy Me Not If when you go to the barber today He asks if you’d like him to ‘tidy up your ears’, Think of all the wildest sprawling vegetation That will never be tidied, or trimmed, by clippers or shears, But keeps on growing in the light of a...

      Too High to Reach   The tree will not let go. High up, out of reach, on a branch, no, more a twig, a little wizened, shrunken face leers down. It clings to the tree and the tree clings back. The apple of its eye. Not a healthy embrace, then. More...