Insomnia Night shakes hurt the most. Firm hands strangle the life out of sedate songs. You’re awake breathing the curse of noise, as dark sniggers. The hours clang, trees thump the ground, damp air sharpens knives. Prickly reminders have lodged in...

      Moderately / A Lot / Extremely I have saved up so many things that they get in the way:  the smell of your temple, just above the ear; the grip of your hand for fear it will be the last. Your laugh and every cumulative ambulance clang jam-stuffed...

      Goat Keeper There is a hill with a house, goats graze in a green pasture. They are my responsibility When the righteous priest comes with his red ribbon I will run him through with a pitchfork, pin him to a tree before he touches one hair on one...

      I am recovering from the crying I did yesterday I thought about it downstairs felt the low hum of a migraine beginning to squeal I prefer falling down the stairs I prefer watching a knife drop from my hand and land in my nail bed I prefer taking...

      Bay of Pigs Our mums pushed us on the swings and talked about the end of the world. Russians, they said, nuclear bombs, radioactive. What if? You never knew what might happen, bloody Commies, iron curtain, on telly. Ssh. The children. My mum...

      It It is the singularity of black holes a swarm of hummingbird hawk-moths  the insatiable hunger of caterpillars smile of a camel, song of a nightingale  the moon frail as the edge of a fingernail – It is dirty as a clam, economical as ants dark...

      Tones  A story in three remembered voices These were the voices which really seemed to shift things. She went, in her finals year, to a surgery, painted pre-war brown and cream, along from the Mumbles pier. There she heard the fat doctor, beaming...

      Outcrops Heaps topped by smaller rocks. The raffish angles of designer boulders. Jenga towers of tipsy stone. Lizard colony. Ombligo de Venus. Navelwort in paradise. Darkness; damp. Foxgloved fissures. Small pools filling fingerholds: finger...