Errata A boy at school liked to collect the broken nibs of pencils: dozens of fractured graphite tines he kept inside a secret compartment in a carved wooden case. They rattled in his bag as he walked: a constant reminder of shoddy penmanship, of...

      fossil fast forward a million years or seven ice cream sticky fingers picking up the shell of me nestled in the sputum on the beach tilting me this way and that looking for angles tracing ice cream fingers through the ess that housed my spine look...

      your flesh is an abacus. i touch every crumb of the morning on you dust it off part you open real slick slow my fingers knead the hard math of you, the science your goosebumps, my abacus beads that substitutes logic. you rosary between my fingers,...

      If I was that woman If I was that woman. If I was that woman in the big house with the tall windows like eyes staring across open farmland where the late afternoon sunset glazes the manicure of her lashes. If I was that woman whose Italian...

      What I Asked of Life When I was six, Life gave me cartwheels, bilberry pie and all of us at the mirror, comparing purpled tongues. From thirteen to thirty I pleaded, Give me a Christian nose, legs up to my armpits. And please, stop me having...

      Mole Understands my Grief She digs into soft earth in search of solace and slugs. I slide into the bathtub below the tidal line. We’re solitary. In enclosed space. Time slips. Down plughole or into soil. My mother ages. I’m dim sighted by how this...

      Colour is Distracting Feel the Prussian Blue pushing against the eyelids. Oxide Green touches the arch of an undressed foot. Raw Umber brushes against the neglected fold of an elbow and leaves a Red Ochre rash. Gold and Silver fill the throat....

      Chutney Music paint the bones of irascible day, braided light, sway of blue mist, island sunrise, yellow bird perches on cordwood, migrant wind, I become a sand house, half-closed eyes, listening to musty ripe poems that hold doors to the last...

      When You Leave, Two Are Leaving One behaves like foreign media: Only notices the events’ cracks, not the water drops hollowing the stones, The ballet school the kids used to go to, its eyes gorged out The dentist’s chair now in the middle of the...