Damp after Christmas    and us on the bench with a downhill view of the back of our house, the running curve of the street, us with a view of windows, the windows we stand behind, tracking the passage of prams, of people with tools for allotments,...

      Rooms Inside the sweet and charmless one, the filthy one, the room with flies or night wasps singing far too high. Shutterless and bleached and all-too-ready-rooms, the gassy room, fitted out with pique and sorrow, the one cascading with cries and...

      Happening Locally Because the park has hidden the place, the parents of fashionable dogs won’t know. Because the grass has covered up the mud where the knees slid, the couple holding hands won’t know. Because the sirens are quiet, the officers...

      Cep Some years I miss the days of its fruiting or else it doesn’t show: a sign of what’s going on underground how hylae and mycelia are faring. Beneath pines at the woodland edge where a little light comes in its soft egg protrudes meaty and...

      Subtraction of Grief Yesterday I slipped into a broken space the wind couldn’t mend. Beside me the reservoir dazzled in the cold sunshine and larch trees losing their copper needles in the fleecing gusts were still, are always, all one in...

      A Pale Fire of Roses It's a child's game: knock on the door and run away. Each time she looked out, she couldn't see who'd knocked. Reporting it felt foolish: it's only a knock on the door. Fourth time and there's a bunch of flowers on the window...

      True Lies My bro’s so good at dying, he shakes this way and that, dancing in the shrapnel. Mama shouts play nice so we bundle into the sofa bed, bodies clumsily naive. Arnie’s on the telly, a CIA agent, a body of nothing but muscle and man,...

      How Inferiority Complex Talks to A Writer Whose Mother Tongue is Urdu I wake up at 7 am, sleep again for two hours, get up at 9 am to finally work, open my laptop, remind myself, no big deal, it's a day, after all, it will pass. Boss sends a...

      The inventor’s wife predicts a storm Each coming storm, I’m alone, love. I take to bed as my blood constricts, is corseted by whalebone. I blot the sky with clouds of my own invention and watch the day run like a shawl’s pulled thread,...