I make broth, feel odd wiping it off your face
moments after swiping through bodies, preferences,
dates. Sunset-orange forget-me-nots mar the napkin cloth

Paysage Moralisé

There’s more to this three-foot square:
lilac vetch & vermilion
field-poppies, some sort of crucifer . . .

Brown limpets with tonsured heads
creeping over the fish-stink isle,
spongy underfoot, seaweed for grass.

Such stillness in the air. The attic window
is a cupped ear set to alert the house to subtle
shifts in atmosphere: auguries; signs; any tiny
notice of cataclysmic change. . .

      What Part of Me? Sun demands a front row seat above the graveyard through the trees when my mother’s placed in soil, surrounded by her friends’ small talk – She must have sent the rays for us. Women in their Sunday best, men in greying suits...

Land has dried its eyes, grown hard
hands and interrogates each arrival:
Where are you from, really from?

If we think we are right
the sun may never set;

Things I did then that I hadn’t done before
 
Asked the neighbours if they wanted anything in my online weekly shop and
Bought yeast, flour, long-life milk and 70-per-cent-alcohol hand sanitiser and
Cut my own hair, even the bits round the back I couldn’t see, and

Elizabeth is hiding in the cupboard under the sink
Small enough to fold between cream cleaner and floor polish
Too big to keep elbows away from wire wool