Bradland
Brad’s arguing with his girlfriend when she turns into him. It’s a Sunday evening and they’ve driven to the rocky outcrop a mile out of town, to watch the sunset and listen out for the coyote with the banshee-howl, and to pretend that suburbia isn’t making their lungs collapse in on themselv
The Salmon
You wanted me to notice you, wearing those bright pink leggings – fuchsia, magenta, whatever. I noticed. I cared. Yes, I cared. Then you slipped into the fridges, swimming through the trolleys and pushchairs – like a salmon. That’s it! The leggings were salmon, and bright, oh so bright
The Oxford Purity Test
☐ Never had an essay crisis? ☐ Published fiction in The Isis? ☐ Haunted by Sylvia’s fig tree? ☐ Did anything for that first class degree? ☐ Identified as a Capulet or Montague? ☐ Worried that Donne’s “The Flea” would work on you? ☐ Have always been a tutor’s pet? ☐ Wrote
Mitch on a Kent Road at Night
Underneath the cold dust of night, skin coated in its sharp spit, he’s bobbing headlight first into the centre of the road, chin jutting out like a speedbump. Soon, the rubber will gravel him again—wrap and warp his skin—and slide him slick across the tarmac, beetroot nucleus pulposus.
Cordiform
Tick tick. Some animals need their loves far away from them. With the canned freeze, phone flickering under a blanket, I could almost understand. Pinecones in the boreal forest are right now closing up on their own warmth, Mr. Attenborough tells me, while long ears and pads have become pelt casings
Promised Lands
I saw you last on Hestia’s hill head high, solemn and waxed in weightpaste, holding the Olympic flare defiantly over the valley— its firelight, bright in marble-star night, falling softly on matted grass, its kindling sparks like flies in measle-blotch blisters and hives upon the scarfaced sca
Lysanias
Setting: Between two columns. In a public square, at the temple steps. Between two dopaminergic neurons. In a cave somewhere lies some sort of plant, some coarse but reassuring bloom of green and – maybe red, some orange. A deep dark avernus feeds it, waters it in lolling, rolling laps up
Portraying
Hetta Garber had been his muse. She was sitting on a divan, watching him paint her. If she leant back far enough and looked in the mirror above her, she could see herself shimmering for a moment before the trick collapsed and she was swallowed up by the turquoise-green and shell-pink background. “
