in spite of everything, your hands
still in my hair still unscrewing the bottle of oil open still ringed with gold staining green your hands memorising the backs of my ears think of your hands folding sheets think of your hands cutting tomatoes i think of your hands smacking the comb against my temples when
Afterthought
In another time my tongue has learnt to trace around the syllables of your laughter. You will forgive my blush, forgive the sameness of my body to yours: both small-breasted, bleeding. In afternoons, your fingers press miso into vegetables; the light scurries into my hands, a ti
Amen
Amen tastes like church cookies: crumbly, stale, hauled out of cardboard boxes, old man’s fingers with popping blue veins beat her to the chocolate ones. She is always surprised when she remembers Sundays in this golden haze, edged in maroon, the smell of mahogany – She breaks off the memory li
Charoset
not ch like chocolate / the kind of ch that gets stuck in the back of the throat & stops you from crying / the kind you throw together once a year / but like the moon it never sets / and stays behind & washes up / i wonder how many miles per hour […]
My grandmother’s hands
In a fading photograph, they sit一双手Newly-wed still. They pause,hovering in a chant of numbers wavering into silence, and words slipout of reach 一粒, 两粒, 渐渐溜走like grains of rice through parted fingersuntil cupped hands left almost barrenwait only to receive a voice: it
how men spend lifetimes
How men spent lifetimes building hotels and never saw them finished. To lie by the pool on an oppressive summer’s day and never see it finished, to drift away. Nothing shines like your reflection. I was so angry at you I hit the water, broke the sun into so many sparkling days. I have been [&hel
Apartment 271
After Meret Oppenheim Steaming in gazelle, espresso in a fur-lined teacup clipped just less than an inch scowling on the dresser. She gullets fuzzed brown innards with a Levonelle & a little salt (a day later) three p
The Isis Poetry Competition HT21 Winner
1 On a summer evening, I stood outside on the pavement lifting my arms & pouring my own-most entire being out downwards, watching it flow in a slow, steady stream & become a shapeless little pool on the pavement — translucent, tacky, awkward, glittering; catching & holding the du
The Isis Poetry Competition HT21 Shortlist
may-day it is long past time for coffee the girls play in the garden and freeze when they touch each-other what life is there left for those of us who wait and wait for the dust to settle what humour is there in prophecy […]