Against platinum birches I want nothing here [but you]. We have trees at home. Shall I wing you the courtyard fountain’s midnight palaver, to lull the list of …
Canakkale
All but a century gone. By the thousand, pinned down on slopes, on beachheads shot to death, and rawboned, ours and theirs, blown to pieces. Two-faced anthropos, late again, stirs …
Gianfranco Faustino defends his Machine for the Extraction of the Soul (3rd prize: 2013 Competition)
And, sir, can you describe your ingenious machine? A finely-wrought confection of filigree and tendon, a four-chambered suction pump, needles thin as vinegar, a glass holding vial for the …
The Wolf Man (2nd prize: 2013 Competition)
Of course I believe that The Wolf Man is the best of my horror films – because he is mine. – Lon Chaney Jr. You can’t know how it …
Control
I’m reading some things Charlie wrote about cancer and Colette because I can’t sleep and because what he wrote is beautiful and it’s cold outside because it’s November and my …
Apologies from the Ground Up
The staircase hasn’t changed much through the centuries I’d notice it, my own two eyes now breaking down the larger vertical distance into many smaller distances I’ll conquer almost absently: …
! (‘It entered creation…’)
It entered creation as sudden as angel or injury – the stacked letters of io, a tower of fire. Already it is intimate with bishops, philosophers, flouting borders, stowed in …
Why Explain the Precise by Way of the Less Precise?
– Timothy Eastman, Physics and Whitehead: Process, Quantum and Experience It doesn’t seem right to think blunt blows could do a thing like that but we do know arrowheads are knapped with …
The Golden Dragon
It was raining in Soho. We were in a Chinese round the corner from where they used to live – a street of tenements long since razed for a wing …
An Easy Day for a Lady
The Grépon has disappeared. Of course, there are still some rocks standing there, but as a climb it no longer exists. Now that it has been done by two women …
Blasket Sound (3rd prize: 2012 Competition)
You’re hugged to my chest in a buoyancy aid called this is not a Life-jacket, comfortable in your skin, in the small, Aran woollen which still holds the animal smell of …
The Fish (2nd prize: 2012 Competition)
Community Panchayal directs rape accused to marry victim – Press Trust of India, November 2004 She can remove her bra and panties beneath the tent of a salwar kameez …
The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out
The perspective is unfamiliar. We hadn’t looked back driving in and lingered too long at the viewpoint. It was a prime-of-life experience. Many things we know by their effects: void …
Bird (1st prize: 2012 Competition)
When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me. The air feathered as I knelt by my open window for the charm – black on gold, last …
2012 Competition: Commended Poems
Rosalind Hudis Rupture There are days she stares at the kettle, but can’t retrieve ts connection to water. Or days when the dry bristles of her brush remind her …
