I dreamt I found some poems lying half-forgotten on a bottom shelf, nearly at the floor of a room where all the walls were shelves. Leaves of paper put together by a child, a girl, I think, who had folded the edges into an improvised spine, so that what I held in my hands was […]

She buried it deep below her cotton pants, her nylon bras. Each time the drawer was opened, its wispy hair caressed the gussets, hooks. In the basket on the wardrobe it raised the hackles of its fur; on still nights she would wake imagining she could hear it purr. Through the solid wooden box she […]

Bedtime. Me, aged five, in Mrs Gethings’ B and B. Door shut, grown-ups far away. Curtains open still. That was a mistake. The window furthest from me turns ape-shaped, splattering the bedroom monkey-brown and me all stiff and human in the bed trying to get smaller while the monkey grows and grows and grows and […]

As I pull off the lid the slow scrape of tin, the click as it bumps over the raised grooves, and then, the musty sweetness, sweet blend of stale tobacco and shiny nails. The smell of sawdust fills my nostrils, red shavings fall like scoops of ice-cream onto the workroom floor, while in the next […]

Lingerie counters are his ivory portal. The slur of silk between finger and thumb (against nipples, under crotch) the supernumerary lace tracing a bracup, frilling a knickerleg. No mere arousal this is the real thing: racks of slips, basques, camisoles peachy as skin which doesn’t need shaving. Back home he enters softness the give of […]

And in your wildest did you become the one with the lamp, the sister dear to me and them and postage stamps, famed as the one who cleaned up dirt? Look how the mud weighs down my skirt where men they rot. I hear their shrieks, their filthy moans. You will not spot me flinch, […]