The day the soldiers come they’ll give you twenty minutes to pack. Think now what you’ll need without this place you call home. And remember the woman too stunned by those uniformed men, who smoked and laughed in her kitchen, to use that precious time. She sat...

  Chalice You are invited to the special dinner where I’m turning turning the blood on the costume a birthmark shaped like a question on your lips there is a wasp an asp in my milk you would have me fail.   Trelawney has been shortlisted and commended in the...

You Eat a Moon as a Metaphor for Pain Here’s what’s going to happen: the moon is going to fall out of the sky and land in the basketball court in front of the apartment where your dad died. You are going to swallow it. Here’s what you are going to do: be buried under...

  to a chandelier Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten. Goethe fire-drunk, you dangle like a bad metaphor: a too-ripe melon, tugging umbilical at the ceiling. your shape:       just right:       the élan of a soap bubble your flux:           too bright:    ...

  Founding these boys have iron bones forged in foundries tongues like metal latches hinged at the shoulders names    clattering clasps on stone their forefathers knew soot as dawn light the trudge & lift of it worn in their palm lines bit lips tasting of...

      Row Your Own Boat, Please. It’s hard to be a bird in the winter – legs dipped into cold, dirty Thames’ water.  No roof to hide under. It’s hard to stand against the current to prove your fallacies, your name, under your oppressing fog. It’s hard...

      Of Shadows and Blebs November, the slow month, crowds the morning streets like a herd of brown ponies looking for a patch of green Ferries, laden with mint and cauliflowers, sprout on the Hooghly River like blebs on its soft skin Calcutta, full of...

      I am about to do something bodacious Barefoot in the yard, eating a slice of buttered toast, I feel a tremor in my bones. Usually, I am full of plans, but not today. I cannot picture the future. I am carried along by the sensation that I am about...

      The necklace was a gift from where they mine it out of the mountains. Haematite: an iron stone. Dense beads as grey as the metal; polished. It is cold against its wearer till it borrows some of their blood heat and if they should move too freely...