#mahsaamini Today I want to be loud and clear and round like an O or hold my gun like an R and live in Revolution I ask the words as I chant them to slip into curves and folds of my body and rise with me Today I'm as woman as possible here's my...

      Then After a time of fires in oil drums, eddies of dog packs where the hospitals had been, first histories were published elsewhere, first conferences counted the spent cartridges. Wildflowers meantime came straggling back to cover the poisons,...

      My Albatross and Me my albatross is an over-stretched suitcase spilling out stuff I must remember my albatross was small but she grew like Topsy now she will not fit back in her box my albatross is a story, a black and white movie, a steam train...

      Containers From on this cliff top, I can clearly see the quarter-mile-long ship across the bay, a dark shape of unseen complexity. I am a sack of bags, with tubes that go between them, and with fine wires everywhere. I am the mind that feels this...

      Rapprochement (Glosa)             Maybe it happens one night, driving             Through an unknown suburb, the realisation             That nothing is going to change, the time             Will never come for explanation – Too Late by Ruth...

      Into the Forest Some of the liveries…are of people who do service so that they receive them as wages, such are the custodians of the palaces, the guardians of the royal temples, the pipers, the seizers of wolves… The Dialogue of the...

      Muscle memory I cut up my plaster cast and buried it deep into the earth. Mystics say if you offer pain to the natural world, it will heal what’s left behind. I prayed out loud when the wind howled and rain cleansed me of grief.  Now it seems my...

      Morton’s Laws Think me not a pessimist, Or, for that matter, a cynic. But my First Law (I don’t Care a fig for Newton) states: If it makes sense it will not Happen. The corollary states: The more sense it makes, The less likely it is to happen....

  Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, who has published ten chapbooks and collections, and loads more interesting stuff with other people. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.