CW: Rape Olives Healing is exchanging rape anecdotes, sitting on a bench outside a pub, eating fat green olives and drinking Guinness. How do you begin? She says, new fringe tickling her eyelids, When the body has its own indelible memory? There’s...

      In My Sister’s Arms When she boarded the ship off the coast of Libya, waters were calm and skies flat blue. She stayed afloat with refugees for days, sharing rice and beans, stories of their left-behinds, never to be seen again abodes. And as they...

      A Thousand Miles —to Ibtisam Barakat I dedicate this to you, my Palestinian friend, walking a thousand miles for all the other refugees who had to walk from war, from poverty from genocide, from repression carrying what they could in a shoe box or...

      Exposure Therapy For your fear of spiders? Behold, I have sourced this perspex box and this adult Goliath Birdeater, a type of tarantula which, interestingly, and contrary to its name, rarely eats birds at all. So I think you know what’s coming. I...

      Runts So there we sit, the runts, the overweights, my Jewish friends who, like me, are more academic than athletic, when the don’t-give-a-shits, late to PE and with no kit, are made to join us in the stands, sidle up next to us, taunt us for being...

      ode to pelvic pain outside a herd of elephants thunder past you are number 7 in the queue you swallow a pill that numb the nerves that are sparking like someone stuck their hand in the toaster the hold music is Sade singing, while being strangled...

      After Surgery Through the kitchen window, an Acer pseudoplatanus regrowing its Brilliantissimum. We both face the bite of a late spring morning: tree, bold as brass – and me? Still here somewhere under protective layers. There’s hope in this...

    Pressed Flower I start nicking her daisies as if they're sunlight plunging forward up the cracked garden path, plucking handfuls to stuff in my pockets, so I might press them in-between the dry paragraphs of a heavy book kept at the bottom of a stack of...

      Lilies of the Valley At four or five they gave to me A bed of Granddad’s un-worked land Between the shed and garden path And end-stopped by the water butt. The old man helped me dig and plant. Next Spring I watched the leaves unfurl, The buds...