Because I’ve been dreaming of the carp I caught (asleep at this late hour with its eyes open, dreaming also perhaps in its muddied way of an episode – a forgotten feeding trauma), I feel ashamed. That fish’s misted gaze was at the core of it. I woke when I started to fill with water […]

From light into darkness             she climbs the stairs arrives, like Concorde             on the edge of space What is she thinking             let me guess Where is she taking us             we couldn’t care less Shall we take sandwiches             maybe, yes.

She’s started to avoid mirrors again. They make other people’s faces seem bigger than they should be and sometimes much nearer. Perhaps ‘mirror’ is really another word for the idea of night as if the glass, like a leaf, might curl and drop, leaving only a frame where the day was. There would be a […]

The phone sounds at four am: five rings, no message. The apartment is borrowed so it’s not my business but I’m awake now. What level of urgency or mischief makes someone at this hour call and not wait? It’s darker than it ever gets in town. Do they hear my breathing? I uncover an ear […]

                                              only stations and the rails uncoiled between them like a leviathan’s tentacles slithering past your ankles through dimly lit city streets. Are there storefronts, houses, cars beyond these circles of light? All that can be […]

In the very dark of the night it rained, a fall of sudden and surprising rain sounding like the sea or snap of sheets shaken out for the line. I lay and listened to its roar, now sheet, now ocean roar, with a dream of mirrors spooling in my head, flickering the way home movies […]

Marking the dark, electric identity voices that trespass from aerosol cans Marking the dark, a human hand dancing on dangerous pages of tunnels and trains Marking the dark, out from the margins scratching grey light with a jitterbug wave Marking the dark with neon-flecked taglines cool cursive threads leading out of the cave

Before I was a woman – I don’t mean physically, I mean consciously, in my mind – before that, I wrote a poem or two. They were political poems; that was my stance. As to where I was standing, I couldn’t have said. I went through that consciousness-raising, that debate about the fate of women, […]

Patron Saint of Noctiphobics “You think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it” from ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ How did you know that you were born? All I did was drip like wax from one womb to another. Where have you been all this time? Without light the […]

I will not write about Christmas lights garlanding the tree, how steadily red blends to sapphire  emerald  gold, how strong the little bulbs must be to throw their dancing hearts upon the café wall, how children try to catch them. I will not say there is tinsel draped about the branches like seaweed over pebbles, […]

Tugged out of true until the stitches burst, the chairs we kept for pub talk: the Blair wars, our young friends debunking freedom’s many enemies that plonked themselves in every argument. What thoughts we had in armchairs in the night. We wriggled till the horsehair came adrift, a fire risk no-one had the heart to […]

Three small rectangles of light delineate my neighbour’s house. A crescent moon hangs thin above the wood, its sculpted, slender curve swerved into points. Everything else is gone so deeply black: starless, obscured, secret.  The bricks have melted; the roofs have quietly collapsed. Each night like this without street lights most things are possible: like […]

sister she ring me when i say i tell her Mama is used up gone and she say oh crap oh deary my word but she also say she not come and i use up the train to travel tracks and track over the airwaves mobile and she still insistent not come and all the […]

I am thankful for striped things –    For rainbow socks and banded jeans;       For tiger cushions and zebra-print bags; The intonation of light and dark;    For clouds that filter sun-rays onto mountains;       For never missing a chance to be on telly. Stripes can be taken    From a pocket, reached for […]

Come the apocalypse and days of cellars filled with the very worst kinds of meat, you and I, with our scant supply of practical skills will have to rely on these      healing hands of yours. Oh I know you’re bored, but place them again over my aching spine, feel the discs shift and […]

We believed the concrete mound, round and firm as a mother’s breast, had been put there just for us. The slide was our anchor: the base of its ladder buried deep in concrete. We ran around it like mad things, went up and over, up and over or poured ourselves into the mouth of the […]

New Year’s Eve – driving along the minor roads of a mountaineous south-west Kerry peninsula,   we’d yelled – Next pub!  and a toothless giant appeared peaked with cap, to direct us deftly – You’ll be grand there – through the hedge gap to a field full of deserted tractors beside the hostelry, thronged inside […]

This is unknown; my bright, berry blood comes late, follows a new calendar. Soon, I’ll say goodbye to this belching red, this faint anaemia, goodbye to the children I never wanted. Last night, walking back from the village, I saw them in the waning moon, holding hands, running away from me.

A frog is always a frog, a moth is a moth, swallows flying in their own manoeuvre. Watch how it works.  Insects in and out of these garden petals as Mum talks about my birthday and how 1966 was the year they stopped giving any girl – Mum’s own name, Myra. Only people can break, […]

There was no grass. Alright, just one small rectangle contained by a wall five bricks high. It was so green it shone, absurd as a garden pond in the outback. It was forbidden. When Bobby Braddock leapt over and sprinted circles whooping in grey shorts he was returned from Sir to class with a face […]

It happened quietly. Even the door he went through each evening was understated. Beneath it, a ruler of bluish light measured its width. Mostly nothing was heard. Perhaps the occasional click. Once a voice, well modulated, said, “This is obligatory.” Then silence. Was it him speaking or someone else? From outside, no other voice was […]

We drowse in our sojourn beneath the rattling carob – there goes Miss Death Knickers, Mister Pulchritude, the Teeth twins and the Fat Man’s moll. We remain silent. Our smells mingle, we are in default ‘wait’ mode and it’s waiting that sludges our blood. There’s the couple from Morden, (that we’ve renamed Mordor) and there’s […]

It wasn’t that I minded the cold kisses of the frogs as they slipped down my nightdress, but the fact they couldn’t or wouldn’t rescue me. None had the clear sight to see me for who I was but, whipped by the branches that coiled inside the wash house, they spun frowning, glassy-eyed, into the […]

Hi, Mum, I’m sorry that I missed the plane.  How far is Heathrow, then, from John O’Groats?  When next you come to meet me, take a train.    I came here to observe the two-toed sloths.  I gave that up. The species is extinct.  (Since sloths could not be bothered using both,   they’ve all […]

Think of me as the drowned village,      my people safe – the fiddler, and the midwife. No old man taps his cane down the street, no woman runs out to her neighbour. Jugglers and acrobats pass me by. I have no lilacs, nor goats, nor fields of wheat. Just water,   like the sound of […]

At ease in the Three Tuns with a lunchtime pint and sustenance, Jabez Few; his six white mice arsling about from pocket to pocket, popping up for a knag upon the shove of wheat laid up upon the bar. Some older villagers referred to them as his familiars. Not aloud and only when fixed in […]

held my mum’s hand for the three days I took to be born, worked nights so she could sleep between feeds, soaped me with Johnson’s Baby Bath alongside two floating books of ABC, taught me to spell playing Scrabble, offered a pink Smartie if I got the letters right and yellow when they were wrong, […]

Punctured gasps of bog cotton in the marsh by the stream only he knew the way through. He liked his knowledge. He had the gardeners dowse selected plants on the hour, every hour, calibrating which were the last to droop. He admired cacti for their instinct, their endurance, liked the sweat of his greenhouse, the […]

The marshes have filled themselves with wetness and bird song since they were left alone. The Basran reed warbler breeds deep in Mesopotamian banks, the original garden of Eden. Each dusk, birds with dark eyestripes flash amber shadows low over lakes and gleaming mud. So many species are flourishing, the African darter, the sacred ibis […]

London, 24 July 2010: The UK-built Zephyr unmanned aerial vehicle is officially the first ‘eternal plane’ in history. i Way beyond wind and weather a new sensing powered by solar panels and fuelling the interviewer’s gabble… …surveillance platform… always there… ii Way beyond eye and knowledge, sand grains lit by the sun. Grains that crunched […]

my journey has been filled with trees and deer and rabbits and pigeons and cows and sheep and flooded plains and hills; rolling rising and falling like a man’s chest in all manner of green: lime and moss and lichen and oak leaf and fern and grass and ivy, all fed by water, by rain […]

Hear this. In my old town house, genteel and shabby, tall-storeyed, phrases loiter in the scullery, waiting for promotion above stairs, there to be liveried, delivered into sentences, sentenced to public scrutiny, sentenced to breath. I am holding mine, but do not advocate lung-burst on your part: the old bells do not ring in the […]

Oh Lord, where am I? Where is my narrow cot, my book? Who is this man following me from room to room? Yesterday I let him guide me to the Health Centre – the five wounds of my stigmata sparking fire, eyes blinded by visions. The Paschal Moon began it. The Friday Passion sent me […]

‘Unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: … I know thy works, that thou art neither cold, nor hot: I would that thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, … I will spue thee out of my mouth.’ The Revelation of St. John the Divine III 14-16 There […]

In my home town stuck in a traffic jam on Pulaski Road I suddenly feel homesick. For a year I stayed away and didn’t think of this road once. Though when I’m stressed my dreams always bring me back to Chicago’s streets. Now I’m actually here waiting for the traffic to move watching the ComEd […]

They weren’t to know. I’ve taken years to track a safe path through my head those tricks like tussocks of heather to skirt unreliable thoughts the soft suck of all the lonely places, their deep throats, quick swallow. Out here, a fistful of earth bleeds water, fields wear a shroud of rain. You can see […]

‘I’ve booked a holiday village’ she says. I see cockroaches and thieves and lager louts abusing the pool but say ‘What date do we leave?’ There’s a purpose to this holiday neither of us has spoken of. Who speaks of broken years? Mothers of daughters lost? I look up local festivals and foods, advice for […]

Here is rest, your journey’s end. The welcome mat put out for you says this is now the place where you belong. Here is food, and drink. We’re guessing that you haven’t had a meal in days. Eat up, grow strong. Here is work, to liberate yourself. No time for chat. The music of your […]

I bought a dozen of this birthday card – two kittens, beautiful, “From both of us” inscribed above the lovely photograph. No use for these now. Time to face my loss, give them to a friend whose husband’s there, who nightly occupies the other chair.

Every family has one somewhere on the tree, slipping out late with a cardboard suitcase, enough to pay his passage. Or slamming out, cracking the plaster, waking neighbours who keep silence, knowing their own. Or one-day-doesn’t-come-in, and his girl eyeing the calendar. Not great writers the raw-skinned terraced lads. They know enough not to look […]