Rathke’s Pouch As you read Place the tip of your tongue Against the roof of your mouth Explore the dome And there in the centre at the vertex Is a small pit This is Rathke’s Pouch We all have one But most have never known it Even though the tongue lies...

    Haunting Some houses are full of ghosts, some people can hear all of them but most never notice. No particular reason for it, it’s just different levels of ectoplasmic sensitivity, nothing to do with genetics or upbringing, one of those random...

      When Your Lawnmower Quotes Stalin you know there’s a problem. The easiest way to gain control of the population is to carry out acts of terror as you push your rotary blade Qualcast across an unruly lawn full of the spirit of Spring, this uprising...

      Patricia Marlowe after Nancy Jane by Charles Simic Step-father choking on his sandwich as she died. Hope, the optimist, flying away. Like spectators at a private drama we were, children peering into a fishbowl. In walked a nurse with a trolley. (How...

      The Snow There’s no need to talk about oneself. What’s real is real all over: a sediment of cold — pure cold — is salutary to the warmth, which thought it had the say. You little enzyme-hungry bits and pieces, life-shoots & insects, winding...

      You Are Now Entering Antarctica   When the glacier breaks, we’re sitting down to eat dinner. A large piece of ice beginning the slow move South puts me on edge, evolutionarily speaking. My skin, already white, feels like it’s shimmering like the...

      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...