Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Coffee Once a currency of the colonial kings of the seas, Captain.This simple plant. It will grow and die and synthesiseSo why, sir, is it stained? Men enslaved; families separated, Killed.Yet the brew drips, drips, […]
Poetry
Eingang freihalten, bitte
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Perhaps motherhood is a solitarywalk down the road of an interrupted dream You point out birds, flowers, how the road arrivesat Spring. Behind you, two balloons dance their strings in your hands. You are heldback on the path, wait at corners, guard against the muffled shadows of […]
Belief
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester “But you have to believe.” We are standing in her kitchenIn front of the stove. That urgency in my grandmother’s voice soft, yet desperate? […]
2 poems
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester This Sunday Morning I watch you from the kitchen window, digging in, reaching for the good earth, summer-baked in suspended animation, knee-deep in love. The kids are asking for Daddy, the dog needs to pee, and the coffee has dribbled its last drops into the pot – […]
3 poems
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester I Heard Her Drumming in the Spring Haw frost comesand light snow duststhe solid ground. I take paper bagsof peanuts,sunflower seeds — black, unhusked— and do the jobyou used to do. I fill the feedershung on a stumpyash tree — a pollard we cut years ago.Binoculars, yours,sit […]
To the Man Sleeping in the Airport
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester Your arm is reaching into the carpeted walkway,where hundreds travel the gentle slopetoward the cold tile of the ground-floor lobby.Your pink stomach winks through the risein your shirt, keeps watch as the crowd followsin rippling curves to miss your hand, palm-up,your fingers slightly curled as if tied […]
Death Robed in A Gown, So Beautiful, So Majestic
Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester For my Grandfather In the old elm that crowded our backyard fence a lone magpie cawked— a woman was wading her feet through a water that had found its way into her stead, & she cursed heavily— […]
3 Poems
Poetry Society i.m. Sarah Maguire Sarah half a lifetime ago I met you in a meeting at the top of Betterton Street. I remember your tank-commander’s watch exactly an hour wrong. You were one year older and half a lifetime further on. I think we made each other frivolous, though you were serious in your […]
3 Poems
Tree (i) The oak tree planted at my son’s birth stands at fifteen feet in its thirtieth year. This early in the season, it holds its crisp leaves tight as gifts for a lost child, rustles in the wind like tissue paper. I listen for its heart which sleeps on, deep in the cool of […]
Gas
Gas The Friday he has your money by doesn’t come. ‘The reports are the reports,’ he says, not answering the phone. He’s a match and every room he enters has been filling steadily with gas. The anniversary passes like a kidney stone which gives him another good idea. The best he’s had for a while. […]
2 Poems
Commuters My body is like an urban car share. In the morning my ghosts climb aboard. They relish the journey without complaint. They like it best when I have time for breakfast and ask them how they’d like to spend the day. They are happy to come shopping, mow the lawn, search the internet for […]
3 Poems
Vicar prays on the beach Steady upwards on his knees, ruminant by stewing sea. Fear pestering him like a litter of pups. Shhh. These big waves blot out the smallers. Irritated. Next to them he is a dragonfly of a thing flitting the water’s roof, not long in the world: snapped in, snipped out. His […]
3 Poems
Eclipsed The third mask is gone. My favourite. How soft it was; its fleur-de-lys pattern, snug blues on taupe, didn’t make my skin look sallow or grey, but rather fresh, I thought. A cloud on my face, it blotted me safely, as I walked past shuttered shops, stood in queues. It held back smiles and […]
3 Poems
May A maiden aunt, who approached Those dazzling heaps of white As she crossed a field to the well, Along a worn path Her nephew followed in June When the blossom was all over. I fished obsessively in the river And made her anxious. (She believed That the big pool by the bridge Had swallowed […]
2 Poems
Retablo for impossible waters Every river a keening. The Seine: I was flayed on my back, dress shrouding, shoes drifting away, I was inventing my own madness and drowning happily in it. The Rhine: I posed on a rock, singing men to their deaths, that must have been me, the woman left and lost and […]
3 Poems
Slow Cinema Slow Cinema You’re late but it doesn’t matter with this one says the man just go on in and the place is empty so the film’s showing to no one and as it happens it happens to be showing an empty auditorium much like the one you’ve just sat down in with a […]
2 Poems
Trim I had him under the clippers. I asked him apropos if He could have been present At one gig in all of music history What would it have been? He thought about this for a while. Little sheaves of dry dark hair Fell about his shoulders. All The blonde goes out of it At […]
2 Poems
In An Orkney Wood Set off through a kissing gate and walk the old drover’s road through Binscarth and Wasdale past the loch to Refuge Corner. In the silver light of afternoon, alder and ash crowd a hoggin track shrubbed with Purslane. This hillside confounds the myth of a treeless north, as the rook-laden canopy […]
2 Poems
The Peacock That lumbering train, tarpaulin wings brushing stone chips and dust, that heaving gush to the terrace, keeping vigil over flower pots and threats from the neighbouring desert—always making a song and dance about everything—a block of iridescence against the co-operative’s cream. The spit and crackle of tempering in daal. Heeng laps the morning […]
2 Poems
Goblincore We knew we weren’t right under our clothes — our tiny wings, our fur. We practiced eye contact on frogspawn at the bottom of the garden. There were hens and eggs lying under bushes in their shamble nests – the bubbled panes of glaire between our fingers, the yolk a golden toad on […]
4 Poems
Greylag Get out my way out the way gaan gaan gaan get out out the way out got to get out gaan gaan get out the way get out gaan got to get out got to get out vandaag today veranderen veranderen verander veranderen veranderen […]
Ferlinghetti in Derry
Ferlinghetti in Derry In a wooden boat, like Colm Cille, Ferlinghetti searched the depths for monsters that might eat his men – German U-Boats fed on Tory Island cod. So, you can rhyme the city, if you will, with Ferlinghetti – Lieutenant Commander US Navy; skipper in the Splinter Fleet on the open, choppy […]
3 Poems
footprint sometimes sorrow looms for years dark cloud inching closer there’s time to prepare you’re braced for the blow sometimes sorrow comes out of the blue a clear sky never-dreamed of woe – you’re unprepared yet recognize your sorrow at once as Electra recognises Orestes by his footprint be it in mud or sand or […]
3 Poems
Sapphics for Elizabeth Lilburne 1649 Where is he whose patience can suffer one more sainted devil ministering independence? Don’t you think our interest equal? Tell us, did you imagine we would be so sottish or stupid as to bide, cook, sew, mend, seeing our peace & welfare broken down, trod underfoot by one who rocks […]
2 poems
OBVIOUS DAYS for Matt Bevis We made a happy home and there we pass our obvious days. Edward Lear They still have their surprises, but there’s nothing they conceal They’re preparing us for: not the new long poem I’m going to write Eventually, or something we’re going to do that’s different From what we […]
2 Poems
Medlock She sails her beech-mast from the woods to Cairo Mill, burrows into darkness under Sun Hill, resurfaces to rock the cemetery in the crook of an oxbow. Winter floods stirred her from her bed – she turned grave-robber, coal-hauler. Ran underground. She’s the night-sweat locked in the stadium’s cellar. You walk between feverfew […]
2 Poems
Saturn Devouring His Son painted at Quinta del Sordo (Deaf Man’s Villa) On Saturn, it is raining diamonds. Soot falls and Goya picks up his palette. He has a choice of four blacks: bone black, lamp black, ivory black and red black. A prophecy declares war on Justice. The very thing Saturn is warned will […]
3 Poems
Gucci Mane I keep diazepam in my car the way an ocean keeps a blue whale asleep like an iceberg
2 Poems
MOSS Scraping into the silence of another empty afternoon, the dogwalker, who never stops, hovers, explores, runs through power-washes. That unknown neighbour leans on the fence, weighs up, once overs the maze of Accrington brick, confirms – it’s nothing but residue after this dry spell and reckons on the amount of silver sand needed. Together […]