Major Arcana No. XXI: The World  You could believe the all is dancing somewhere where the body is not bruised, where hearts are glowing like an earthrise, where all time and time’s losses, all wrongs are resolved in the golden snake that winds...

      From The Last Divided Capital In The World Childhood memories of sandbags, and barrels against barbed wired brick walls barricading the way to the unknown. The spoken of in choked up breaths. Displaced throats echo into mouths born generations...

      A part of my body is dead, hardened and now so hard you could use it as a door knocker or the beak of a woodpecker; it has turned the soot of Black Death, of Shanghai smog; I want to crack a nut on it like a squirrel, parched walnut brains waiting...

      Prised Apart   I raise my arms and let them slump back down. Maybe they don’t belong to me. Our movements more exhausted, looser Did we show rage. Did we try for once to rest your hands on your hips, hold yourself like a good china cup chipped as...

    The Old Fishing Village The rain is a gauze. I could have slept in, but listen to gulls bothering the cruise ships. What more can rain throw at us? Joe’s boat slips out once a day for weather-beaten tourists who find us on old maps. The yellow houses on...

      Wasp’s Nest I wanted to be a goat when I was a child. Agile and cloven- hooved. My days were spent poking cowpats with a stick, sending clouds of bluebottles into the hot sky as the hay meadows chirped with crickets and grasshoppers. One evening...

      The New Owner Meets The Duende in the Old Barn Last night, in the stone barn behind the house I met a duende, knee-high, Bigfoot stomping, Spluttering gobbledigook. ‘What’s your problem, Duende?’ I asked. Perhaps a touch Patronizing. ‘You, you,...

      Evening Lists Inadequacies unreels our slippages. My daughter             kaleidoscopes supermarket-aisles              in the apartment lift monotone. Squirrelling through     the doorway, she pictures what to; I don’t....

      Weekend Work Do Tina and I are circling the room at speed wrapped in white table cloths. Who knew this was what we came here for? We are tiddly after a day of contributing — to workshops in small groups, structured chats on the sunny lawn — by...