A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil
in the archangel’s cut brown stalks.
Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters . . .

At the shore of impossibility
last moments come to nothing
all our plans die in the salt air
of another new day on the black sea.

My trans friends and I just want to go swimming
 in cold water
 without a thousand eyes watching.

It was the snatch of a dream,
someone said this is not
 
what you do in the desert,
it was one precise thing, not a list . . .
 

We leave early, drive for two and a half hours,
park, find the church where you were married.

The sky opens
Blinking its single slackened eye.

She cut letters out of me,
which quietly and unnoticed
danced red poems.

Annette the gap-toothed,
You kissed a man & I was born. You gave him
your laughter & he built an empire,