Being a Mother I look back and ask, how did we get by? Was there too much angling after exactness? Did I promise you something and fail? Unfathomable, the way things become, like winter, a stretch of bare garden. Gone the violets, the brittle...

    The Trickster Talks of her Tears I wake and, for no reason other than life itself, my face feels like it’s made of tears, and they creep along the insides of my eyelids, like rain shifts across a windscreen at speed, but somehow they’re only ghosts of...

      The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place Be secretive - don't make confidences, at most drop hints. Be small bright flowers - peripheral, almost overlooked. Have aliases, a sudden sweet smell at sunrise, a choir in the distance from the warehouse car...

      One touch and you Become it   Playtime in the streets. All of you in a line, behind a Wolf who has his back to you. What time is it Mr Wolf? Four o'clock! He shouts without turning. You let another little girl or boy, too eager for their own good,...

      I Draw a Line of fire and blood, of ants running in horror, a line of broken windows, locked doors, of size four school shoes with shiny bows, a line of thunder and lightning falling into the living room of our so-called home, a line of frightened...

      Nightcrawler Your black eyes, black as the void that surrounds us, stare back at me, so black they catch any trickle of light, the time on the radio, the table lamp, the crack between curtains that let the day in prematurely. They are my eyes,...

      Indoor Cloudspotting Yesterday was leadbellied. Bearing down not floating away. A sense of nimbostratus gathering shadows outside the kitchen windows. You tick the box marked ‘chance of rain’.  We’re classifying drift, tabulating it into neat...

        Two Girls on a Greyhound The older girl turns her face towards the window. Hides behind her curtain of long brown hair. Her sister is asleep. They are never going back there. Stepping off the coach, the seat of the young girl’s jeans is...

      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...