you
stoop
& shell
your self
touch
in gustgasp

You stopped the car in the lane just before our driveway.

I didn’t ask why. Chestnut trees leaned in on either side,

the damp air breathed. You sat there, looking straight ahead

and said there’s nothing worse than being queer.

This is how it starts.

Champion of every round,

one for hurting / for loveless / for rinsing yourself off afterwards
and meeting your eye in the bathroom mirror and saying firmly
you have not made a mistake / for a mistake

      Shabby chic my body is a shipwreck blooming with coral I open my legs and out pour gold doubloons it is impossible to slam a door underwater there is an opening here fathoms deep I have made a mast of myself washed up on a beach somewhere once a...

    Marianne North transports the tropics to Kew She packs the globe in a wooden box, ships it to London, shrinking each place she visits to the space between her hands then draws them apart like a conjuror nectaring sunbirds out of sable hair, butterfly...

      Willow Woman After ‘The Huntress of Skipton Castle Woods’ by Anna & the Willow Pliant yet unyielding—there’s steel at my core— I’m fixed in the flex of blown breeze, leaf ripple. Hems besom discarded leaves, gathering them in as kin, and I’m...

        Tetris We’re there on the midnight pavement with the amps and the guitars, the kit and the cables, remember, you and Drew and Tom and James and me, after that gig— instead of the bus the taxi driver turns up in this car like your mum’s and...

      A very small thing. I found your fingernail creased inside the poetry I read to you.  A dry paring, thin crescent, white as a hospital tag, cut when you could still fight me, with your vowels and yelping, with the stricture of your hands. I...