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
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. “
God Pities the Nursery Children
A Translation of Yehudah Amichai’s ‘God Pities the Nursery Children’ [אלוהים מרחם על ילדי הגן ] from Hebrew. God pities the nursery children, He pities school children even less As for the גדולים [big ones], He will pity no more – He’ll let them fend for the
A Concert in the Ante-Inferno
[Inspired by Inferno, Canto III, where Dante and Virgil travel through the Ante-Inferno and cross the river Acheron with the help of the ferryman, Charon. The performer, called ‘Nick’, is loosely named after the singer Nick Cave, the frontman of the Australian Rock Band ‘Nick Cave and the Bad
What Remains
A pink scarf he bought that first Christmas together. Not that she ever wore scarves, which was why he’d bought it in the first place, and why he shouldn’t have bothered. (It snowed that January – more sludge than snow, really, the kind that produces muddy, misshapen snowmen – and sh
There isn’t a difference between a body and a daughter
It started with a white morning like a blind eyeball, the blankest of sleeps. And it started with sickness: Hanna wasn’t there. She was old, she was going deaf, and she wasn’t well enough to face the freezing mornings in the clothes bank, with the women who became desperate as they waited, who t
