Icebergs
CLOSING SOON. Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch, Tate Modern, 2018 We had come for the melting icebergs. We came early, clutching phones and children, to our space before the Thames, where the artist had assembled those lumps of cold whiteness. A menagerie of endangered specimens of ice – it wanted so
A Woman Disobedient
No tattoos, my abuela says es feo, muy triste paying someone else to give you scars, one eye on her telenovela and the other on my arm, she says no more pie
A Ghuí ar a Croí
Dá mbeadh brait gréasacha na neimhe Maisithe le solas airgid óir, Iad gorma, dorcha, agus séimhe, ‘S mise amháin ina sealbhóir, Chuirfinn fútsa na brait gan agó; Ach, níl a’am ach brionglóidí bochta; Chuir mé mo bhrionglóidí fútsa fadó: Céimnigh orthu go ciúin, cosnochta.∎ &n
Where Are You From?
Not London. Cities with other litanies: Snow Hill, Nechells, Harbourne, Lozells. The late bus from Birmingham, cupped by the fierce hand of the Black Country, and house-proud Solihull, stealing looks, stuck out on its own down the Chiltern line, to Marylebone. Cities with other rivers, other bridges
Whitby Harbour
You can’t quite put a finger on it – whetted, held up to feel the wind. Maybe it’s something on the – &nbs
Tasbih
(I don’t want this poem to be in English) I once called you rosario, a crucifijo clenched in the hand of Abuela whose lágrimas are a stuttering lluvia que cae al rancho. It cuts carretera-stones, prays for the roadside skulls of drunken sons. I want men to stop leaving her: for Abuelo Güicho to
Portokalia
“out of nothing I have created a strange new universe” – János Bolyai We were left an orange, sunset-blotted, not the golden apple we forgot. We were left a portokalia, when we stopped seeing, piles of leaves and mounds of mud gathered around the garden under our feet. We were left lost l
Stockholm Syndrome
we captured the city / persuaded the morning to wait / not to dawn / or betray us / or tread on our shadows just yet now we are alone / but entrapped is a bat in the net of your wings / these have managed somehow to regenerate we captured the towers / […]
Dialogue
It’s easy enough to get in-between things, easy enough to see you sway in the library corridor between your shadow and the rainy window I sway in the library corridor between my shadow and the rainy window, when it comes up in a quiet moment, the current hitting the backs of my knees and you’re