Pest Control
Around mid-March, my mother developed an obsession with killing wasps. The weather was still cold and grey when I arrived home, the threat of the pandemic having driven me from my university accommodation, but as it began to brighten and grow warmer, a few sluggish and lazy queens found their
Stockholm Syndrome
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea” (Genesis 1:26) Three fish are bored. They pass the time thinking. “Why are we here?” one asks. Another answers: “If we were not, then who would force those simple sea [
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 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
Swiping White
When Pittsburgh-born author Celeste Ng tweeted that she didn’t usually find Asian men attractive because “they remind me of my cousins”, she couldn’t have foreseen that she would be castigated anonymously as “another white-boy-worshipping cunt” and accused of raising the next Elliot Rodg
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
Lost at Sea
The morning of 7 July 2018 dawned like any other at the whaling station of Hvalur hf, Iceland’s last extant commercial whaling company. Until it didn’t. The night before, one of the company’s whaling boats had returned from sea dragging its usual catch of a fin whale on one side, and something
