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      Love Birds Agapornis They married in a chapel of black steel bars, tethered up their feathers to serve as stained glass. One year in and their chirrups are still hymeneal. Humans can’t help but pass by and beam at this pair, bonded for life. All...

      Barbecue here, water does not run. instead it sits obediently in old plastic containers here, where monkey steals avocado when window is open, here where white jesus hangs from the cross and weeps into the food, where father is a tree and mother...

      Ringed Her feet snagged in a cleverly-placed net my sister waits for him to untangle her, to hold her head still between thick fingers, feather ruff ticking in each rapid breath, her eyes black and bright, body eclipsed by the size of him, nothing...

      Denizens Mice live in the London Tube. A train leaves and small pieces of sooty black detach themselves from the sooty black walls and forage for crumbs in the rubbish under the rails that are death to man. You can’t see their feet move. They...

      What Mr. Pig Did After Paula Rego   Prince Pig and his First Bride     2006   Mr. Pig modelling his best Sunday suit of farmyard smells, flees from the cook’s cleaver to find himself a sow. This snorty, stinky, porker seeks a succulent female but...

      Medea My heart is breaking, so I’m setting up my new Wonder Oven. The waft of toxicity as I run it on empty for ten minutes is a welcome distraction. Do you know what a Wonder Oven is? Let me tell you. A Wonder Oven is so much more than just an...

      This Sea Is Ours We enter in darkness. Naked feet rush over cold pebbles, phone-torches light our pathway to the sea. We shed layers of hoodies, pyjamas, socks and trainers. Seafoam slashes cold against our knees. We swim further into night,...

      You Know What 9am Feels Like, Right? Like, If Your Watch & All Clocks—Suddenly Worldwide—Disappeared, You’d Still Know What 9am Feels Like, Right? The first wristwatch was first worn in 1810, despite what old turn-it-up Flintstones episodes...

      Dusk Was Yesterday Alone, I drive along the midnight, winter road. My left hand at the 12 o'clock position of the steering wheel. And I coast. I let out the day’s long breath, which started out today as a sigh. Somewhere off in the distance, I...

      Ode to Remission My mother is here, and might not have been, so I hold things tighter: the small-getting-smaller of her running with my daughter down the beach, every conch and whelk they gather, the scar tissue just peeking out of her swimsuit,...

      Glove My stubby maroon glove spent a chill night on the velvet ridge of Clent Hills tangled in summer-dried grasses and snapped seed heads, pecked at sniffed at and tumbled among crusty rabbit droppings. Cuff sheltering tucked-in snails and slugs,...

      Bin Day It’s Wednesday and / again / I’m laying pages of newspaper on the kitchen table / tipping up the food waste bin / scattering teabags and potato peelings and orange pith in a pile / and wrapping it up like chips from the chippy / so the...

      Pilates Zoom We cultivate the knack of getting down on the floor and back up three or four times each day. The constellation of cables, chips and thin air through which our leader observes us is mysterious as prayer, more predictable, precise....

      Charm for a walk     In a dull sky the guttering flame of a white heron, drawn down to the bourne. Then a field of black dock fluttering and rising like a bedsheet of crows. The webbed slush that vanishes to the touch. Did you pay for...

      Secrets     We could tell there was something we weren’t allowed to know. Something kept hidden from us children, something not quite right with Mr Jones. We wondered why his wife had rabbit-in-the-headlight eyes. When blue lights came...

The Rescuers       When the waters broke we were out there, borderless, with just a view of bloodshot sky from the labour suite, his weight a nautilus shell, face pinched in perpetual sleep, one silk eyelid pulled awry as dawn held him at the edge of...