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      Happiness in my lockdown sock drawer Test-tubes, conical flasks and molecules. Back to A Level Chemistry with Mr Cartwright we learn about magnetism with marker pen examples. A moon lander, planets and a telescope and I am back in my childhood...

      Mrs McNab All of a sudden, would Mrs McNab see that the house was ready, one of the young ladies wrote…Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. She comes as summoned, care taker with a leer, a lurch, a grinding of boots on shingle, tears cobweb veils of...

      The Night A gymnasium with crepe paper and leather soles, an iron box with only singles, rain without the drop, a clever dance where the floor taps our shoes. I cling to your scapula, your hand, like clothespins, like darkness, following the...

      Stars Emerging from the tent at 3am, you see this field of fools, that hedge, the sea, all subtly lit by an array of stars in numbers that your mind cannot compute. They’re barnacles fixed on a dark flat rock, and that faint streak of quartz marks...

      New same Year                                                             January 2021     Every day,           I am a mother, and I am asked   to explain things I don’t really                understand   – like contrails      or the...

      Half Brother (It rained, remember?) We climbed to the roof, took turns dying our bodies glistened & shook, mist from our tongues I step into your game screaming I get five lives! (but you always win) Hold your breath, count to ten cut your...

      The Gift A walk in the park. I see a girl sitting cross-legged on the grass, in front of her a box tied neatly with red ribbon, she stares at it, her chin resting in her palms. She doesn’t move. I watch others watching till a boy approaches, he...

      First Snow When snow fell at night, it was her future decided in hushed tones outside the room where she slept, so in the morning when she rose her world had been swapped, swivelled like a set in a play, permitting her (as she stepped out) to...

    Oranges On a dark Friday, in the early night I walked past an orange on the pavement by a parked ambulance, in a setback carpark, under faltering streetlights and hefty air. No stars were shining but this orange seemed to do so, and for a fleeting moment...

    Workshop for Shy Self-Promoters Although I have never been on the pushy side of unassertive, what precedent in tactical avoidance I’ve established for shy self-promoters!: a workshop on low-visibility preening in Ray Bans and balaclavas by Inspirational...

    The Human Market Animals gather beneath a plasma screen in the square: a colony of lemurs with calculators in their paws, lizards with phones that twitter and purr. How did you get here, naked, bruised, unshaven? An owl scratches numbers into your...

    Emily Little love, I see your face, so like your grandfather’s. There is the obvious - his July-lion’s mane tamed to your September copper. But me in the middle, part him, part you, I was always too distracted by laundry, homework, things that keep a...

    1901: The Interpretation of Owls (Four owls on a branch, and one on its own, all smoking long churchwarden clay pipes, and listening to the music of a songbird in front of a giant moon – like five patients waiting for wise Dr Freud.)   The First...