Visit Now that I am here, it’s clear. What I wish for you, Lydia, is that you will be washed up naked and alone on the shore of the Phaiakian’s island, not in this white space with locked doors and that blank-eyed doctor armed with a pile of...

      The Virgin Mary Is Crying I am thirteen and leaving our house as breath haws out my mouth. When I breathe in hard me nose burns. Hands are dead, fingers tender as if they have been burnt. Hunched shadows hit the work trail; they close gates...

      Winging It He loved his pigeons, almost as much as serving his Lord. He would attend to them when his other flock were grazing on life. He’d gurgle along in the loft, ministering to their needs before the race. Setting the clock as they were sent...

      Wax doll From a surfeit of dark you’re wax-cold at the basement window while through the back of the house light filters down the corridor and beyond there’s the garden with banana and bougainvillea and a child under the palm leaves holding out a...

      eden does my world scatter and sprout possibilities every time I take a step? I choose a sapling – it flourishes and flowers, pollinates and I pluck we tumble through the cycles selecting seed after seed I’m trapped in the circle leading from...

      Tip In the evening light at the freezing tip we lug bin bags from the blanket of the car in masked anonymity through tired hi-viz employees, mumbling advice to pallid human figures, barely there, excising months of lockdown trash. I find a working...

    blackhouse when I squat down by a stone wall the moment enters windless broken arms around me naked to the sky filled with a hearth of tree a machair rug when I lose all sense of others as far as           the sea and then some slip down a funnel become...

      Floundering March 1897, a rough winter turns rougher. A mast-gnashing southwesterly disrupts the balance between sea and air. The horizon swirls, then vanishes. Gale-force surges churn up 30ft waves, haul chaos in their wake. Surf froths like the...

      Wild Rufus after Elmore James ‘The Sky is Crying’ Wild Rufus played sax in the Duke of York jamming with Deano in the old tap room. Mostly twelve bars: Muddy Waters, Son House, Elmore James – I believe I’ll dust my broom. I snuck in late with my...