Abertawe After Richard Siken For CHD Tell me about the time I mansplained that Swansea is the English for Abertawe and means town at the mouth of the River Tawe. And about when, from the hill above Rhossili beach Lundy Island’s spectral mass...

Daedalus
Plato loved his incessant questioning
of the natural world’s engineering

I tempt you with morsels
of soft-skinned peach, a pear sliced
in quarters, pipless and skinless.

Red-hot-pokers blazon her two world wars in flowerbeds, and in her hearth. The coalman drops odd nuggets under gaslight for neighbours to fetch in a bucket.

Seats

Before a table of white
People, I stand with ballet
Slippers strapped/soft soles
Head pointed towards the angels…

The first night you lay down your head in London
there is hawthorne between your sheets.

He emerges at nightfall, lights a solitary votive candle//
prostrates himself at her scuffed toes.

Haul down the ladder and you’re in
under a skylight casting a blue dream.

This is the song of the cells’
soft throb, the quivering coherences,
their shuffling the profit and loss
of life, to have and to hold.