It’s the only chance you get
to know you’ve been seen.
You have to log in and out
and again. My friends use
icons to draw elaborate pictures
with their screennames,
accompanied with song lyrics
from an older brother’s
record collection. I attempt
symmetry like I’m a blind sculptor
asked to make a face
with as many straight lines as possible.
I like big blocks of text.
I like tying up the billpayer’s
phoneline. You can tell me
anything, up late bathing
in the blue aurora of the screen.
One night i got bounced
from a chatroom for laughing
at a guy who asked if we have
any Barenaked Ladies fans
in the house. Not cool, dude.
I went into another one
and pretended to be a girl.
A man in Chicago asked
if I’d shave my pubes
and mail them to him.
He’d cover postage, and throw
a few bucks my way,
show me a real good time,
typing out my name
with his whole mouth.

Use me
like a spit-valve,
empty me of all thought—
I mean—
treat me, allow me
to function
as the spit-valve
affixed to your day’s long tuneless
crowbar. Fill me
with your guts, your froth,
your offal, your pips and stones,
your phlegm and knucklebones,
your screwed-up pages and hot glue.
That fishbone you almost choked on at lunch—
slip it down behind my eye, beneath my eyelid
like a note, a key. The meat you won’t touch
because you can hear it
and it sounds like a filthy machine.
The wetness of it
is my wetness, my deep wage
of spit.

               /

                          Flush the beautiful night
                          from my throat
                          like an unscathed bird.
                          Marvel at my breathing.
                          Breathe with me.
                          Stroke my hair.

and everyone I loved upped sticks for London.
I got to bleaching their skirting boards,
rehoming baby spider plants, demolishing
the knock-off Cornettos in the freezer. June was a chorus
of van doors slamming shut. It was a season of change
and I bore it like a raging sunburn; peels of me
flaking like confetti in the gutter. Someone always
had a tennis ball, a tinny speaker. The stink
of freshly cut grass, a cheap candle with an endless wick.
One morning, my landlord cut a hole in the wall
and the rats finally spilled out. I laughed a lot
that July. Slept in the garden on an old bed sheet,
lived off crisps, dips and cheap larger
someone else was buying. There must have been times
I wobbled: a sad picnic table on its last
rotted legs. But there was always a woman
who knew the best spot for a wild swim, drove
a beat-up car, had nowhere else to be. The city
was one giant smoking area with a new friend
down every alley. I kept promising to visit
my parents, give blood before the next tattoo.
Things were fine! The rain understood
when to take a month off. I started flossing before bed,
telling anyone who would listen best August
of my life, waiting for the leaves to crisp, the balmy
relief of an early night. What happened to the delicious
joy of waking on each other’s sofa.
Keeper of the spare key. By September, their texts
arrived, swearing it’s not the same without you,
someday, they’d come back.

In the kitchen, lychees coddled
between thumbs on the island, a cloth
of breeze through a crack. Above us,
a pendant lightens the fruit, an arrow
to the spot where bark skin hues
closer to bright pink than brown. This
is where a lychee feels raw, a soul
before it hooks onto body: boneless, moist
beneath the shell. You dig a fingernail
through the rough. How thick it sits
on the flesh, a cuddle of humps unwilling
to be breached. You’ve mastered this, nail
cleaving like a gust through foam. Mine,
too bitten, blunt. Next to your hand,
a plastic bowl fills with them, undressed,
slick, honey-glistening on the bulbs.
Same way light catches your corner white
eyeing my modest attempts—a mixture of
play, of pity. Does this get easier in time?
Every peel, flesh with permission to feel
the first lick of our breath.

The bathroom swallows everything I give it.
Here is the flush that unspins its way beneath
the street, the plughole and its metal breath,
fluent in dust and bones and all things.

Is the entire world my bathroom? Is everything
a commode if you're creative enough?

Sarah says a house built in the sixties is best,
wants to live somewhere designed for people
with access to birth control, quality psychedelics,
quaaludes and good weed.

I am keeping myself in cycles of clean and unclean,
patient as I wait to unfold myself into a bath. I am a
prehistoric fern, an outstretched hand, the raspberry
fruit roll-up I take from my pocket and offer to you.
You place it under your pillow.

Through the cracks in your sleep, you say:
harbour      linen     linoleum
wavy    leaf       livered

And I am overtaken with an urge to touch your lips
as if I could hold open the words and climb inside.

I’m no saint / I was up
all night breaking a heart,
killing a man / I walked
with feet backwards /
wasted hours brushing
away / this madness / three
burnt leaves from the
windowsill / I was up
all night / calling birds
of prey from a shameful
sky / my vision blinded
by white wings / slicing
across terrified glass /
but love me / anyway /
toss kisses down
the oubliette / bind
my tiny hands / fast
of the butcher’s blade /
turn, now / watch me
shadowbox bruises,
breathing / say Alison /
why say such terrible
things / I wanted only
to hold you.

—for Joshua

                                    Iceland trains horses to write out-of-office emails.
                                                    —NZ Herald, 29 Jan 2024

Did it hit you like a truck
when you woke up? Horses in Iceland
can write your out-of-office emails. Instead
of wearing your keyboard
as a fashion noose
what good is all
your pride—what can it do,
When horses in Iceland can write.
You’re either lonely or don’t know how lonely you are.
So what good is all your pride? What can it do
though the consequences
aren’t predefined
of being lonely
and knowing how lonely
we are. If Wave 1 is my energy and Wave 2 yours, the consequences
aren’t predefined. Such is the corollary
of a subtle mind.
If Wave 1 is my energy
and Wave 2 yours
they’re both constructive
and destructive sometimes. Such
are the corollaries
of two subtle minds where
one writes poems, and one codes.
We’re both constructive. Destructive,
sometimes—like the stupidity of
a miscalculated joke. That’s why I write poems, and you code
the split between sympathy
and empathy when you’ve been
stupid, miscalculated your joke. If I slow
down and just
imagine it: the split between sympathy
and empathy
is being understood. As
to understand—
slow down. Just imagine it: horses sliding
down fjords in the light of being understood,
as to understand. Graze factors
with me in Iceland.

generates milquetoast holly jolly jazz to lull us
into complacency—a term typically used to describe
anything we have grown accustomed to hearing or seeing
—albeit slightly askew and cut short by the loop.
Then, there are the spines of pageless books—
unless you count the marshmallow-like blocks wedged
between the covers as pages—stacked to the ceiling
of every window in the square no matter whether
they’re windows in a café, apartment, or patio-facing bar
that appears to serve only marshmallow-stuffed books
along with a handful of muffins without a single spirit
or person in sight, as if we are being reminded by a program
that once we are all gone, the only thing left of us will be
stale baked goods and the words we left on the page,
and even those can be kneaded away. But the music is fine
enough for the dogs to listen to while we are away.
Studies say they like to hear music more than voices,
and our pups will not even glance at the screen anyway.
They have too large of a window to an outside world
that consistently reveals too many real scurrying chipmunks
and skulking stray cats to get lost in the discrepancies
of something so worthless to anything living as a fake
reality playing background music over a twelve-hour
snow shower that never accumulates to anything
worth fussing about longer than the time it takes me
to lace up my weathered brown leather shoes and bid
the pups adieu with the reminder you and I will return soon
and the assurance that we are not going anywhere,
especially this wonderlessland even dogs don’t like,
which does nothing for me either on my way out the door
other than bring to the surface a deeply rooted acorn
of grandparent-to-grandchild advice that has grown into
such an established white oak in the recesses of my mind
that it could now be chopped down, charred, and shaped into
a barrel brimming with barrel-proof bourbon meant to be
taken straight: Never trust a thing a dog doesn’t like.

The all boy
proves himself mischief

rewilds uncontained
praise, an excuse.

Straggler, wallflower—
wedgie up the flagpole.

What docks in you like the scar on the nose
dad once called perfect.

A band of all boys nothing
but rubble, force to unstop.

Everything sways on a tide of blood silent as night
in a suburb. Plain as a girl.

Nothing else fit. Pleasing
and female, flower into your next drenched thing.

my daily screen time is fine / my spine is strong and sits in the
ideal S shape / I do not luxuriate in my skull’s dirty bathwater
/ I soak in the sound of stars and summer / my inner child is
full from honey indulgence / I have appropriate and
proportionate emotional responses / I tackle trauma like a
boxcutter / compartmentalise / condense / everyone is very
impressed / hot girls collect sylvanian families / ketamine will
never hurt me / the crisis support worker thinks I am charming
/ calories are a conspiracy / everyone on this bus wants to fuck
me / I am whimsical and flourishing /

I know how I reek like desperation, stench of a corn-fed
farm boy. Wasn’t raised off the land, no, but all
Indiana owned that stench. It wasn’t so pretty
the things I did for fun. Didn’t want to turn out
typical, but there I was chewing on a wheat stick,
watching shadows marry the edges of my shape
to asphalt. At the blacktop behind school, I mashed
the spring helicopter seeds into green paste, a potion
I pretended was magic, still wanted to believe in something
super-real, like dragon rollercoasters out in China.
Told the queer girls from class there was a baby
bunny trapped in a sewer grate, and after they ran
to investigate, I swiped their loose change and claimed
I made that rabbit disappear with the might of my mind.

decorated the hallway dresser: mini candles with a personalised scent and trinket 

bottles hung with tiny luggage tags: absinth makes the heart grow fonder. There was 

dancing, lustful looks across the lounge, the ceremonial slashing of His/Her towel 

gowns, couple friends fantasising about untying the knot. We’d prepared games, trivia, 

‘Who Said What First?’ followed by charades: ‘Act out the Argument.’ Relationship 

scorecards marked 0-5. Anonymous feedback forms. I went to fetch the piñata for the 

climax but the neighbour’s kids had got there first, sat slug-like in the front room with

rainbow smudged mouths. To save the night we agreed I’d offer myself. Our guests, 

eager for their turns, wondered who might make the winning split, what treasure 

could come streaming from inside. My feet swung low like pendulums as they hooked 

me to the light.

These days I’m scared of cutting myself when I shave;
there are so many blood vessels in my face, and
so many ways to contaminate the blade.

We lose a chunk of the highway every time it rains
and I get to have such interesting conversations as:
“How many cigarettes have you smoked this week?
Is it more or less than last week?”

Everything that happened here was so long ago
it’s hardly worth mentioning.

I walk to the diner, because it’s healthier than driving
and my doctor is hell bent on keeping me here.
There is less of you in the world with every passing year
but at the very least I can say that someone
thought about Laura Palmer in the diner today.

time isn’t cis     its dendrites break and glimmer
can’t cleave a from b x or y      there are no genes
i was greened from a leaf     and as a child i always
knew i was an emily dickinson poem     all those
afterimposed slashes      gasps for an air unteemed
a deferral of “i”s        i knew i was different when
i watched marie antoinette and wanted to become
the soft pastel light       in a sofia coppola film
i’ve had an unchanging identity       as windtrembled
grass / dana scully / the hushed downy purple
in the mourne mountains / a line from mrs dalloway
about taxi cabs and seas and danger / the touch
of a beautiful stranger’s hand       on my shoulder
flustering my pronouns       i’m disparate in how
i walk through streets / hallways / men’s bedrooms
i don’t taste like labels       i’m a kin to the folds
in my lover’s shirts         lingering there slantwise
bunched plural      and still      one historied body

and what is it anyway?     this inkstain i was     i’m not one
for crying over     the air’s tentative     the tension of its motion
lessness      unhefted and exiled      but i’m not unvengeful
something was here and then it wasn’t     if something hears me
tonight i’ll retell any version       how i’m an unabandonment
how seconds strip your sting’s stem     from my skin’s circuitry
i drink a spicedrum dietcoke     lemonslice the memory      acute
bearing the whelp of my meat     across this sticky floor i am
floaty and prepositional     a wedge between stones     fickle
islands      i forget my parents      removed from the sectarian
fractioning       glitter of empire crusting like an exoskeleton
across the bar      another islet     forwardflares me into a dream
of their hands their neck     a kiss we cleave becomes its own ūhta
that darkness before dawn       hour of nocturns and the harshest
brawn of desire’s seep      in a loverless bed     this person gleams
through me like a spell of fainting       and i know how touch
can seem from the outside like a battle       how it unlatches
one grammar from another       from a /you/ they unmade
into composite     as if it were a godgift       to be consumed
into the bleared tapestry    of their elegiac         recitation

Nothing wrong, really, with wanting to be a small-time god
Lust pigeons flocking, eyes beady & bright, we all coo you

            Call us & we come running, no need to advertise
            Muscle slip-sleek over bone, ancient vision aloft

Air Max squeaking freshness, size nines toeing this brilliant slab
We watch your short show, flame-shapes vanishing in our blind spot

            Little devils & nightshades swallowed, lye lapping
            No substance left when we empty the vat, simply colour

Plain shades, metaphorless, pears pear-green, cherries cherry-red
If you wanna rut, put up your hand

            We are a Palace of perpetual sinners
            We steal out into the first mist, disco-line skin goosed with anticipation

Arms lining the edge of the clearing, funny bones against silver bark
No tracking it, little deity, just rough promises, all our days ripe for devotion-stacking

Your mother knew I wanted it.
Your mother knew I wanted it so bad
she unscrewed the locks to your bedroom.
Your mother knew I wanted it she knotted the curtain
and drilled it to the ceiling. Your mother knew I wanted it
she fixed cameras in the kitchen, watched you laugh
when I put two lemons in my bra. Your mother knew
I wanted it she tackled me during a friendly game
of football, tightened the bandage of my leaking ankle.
Your mother knew I wanted it she managed to sniff-out
the stash of unused condoms. Your mother knew I wanted it
she sent your father in while I was taking a shower.
Your mother knew I wanted it so bad
after a month of no bleed, reluctantly rubbed
the small of my back. Your mother knew
there was nothing she could do. I loved you,
so your mother let me stay over on weekends,
pretended to ignore my howls while you pushed it in.
Your mother knew exactly what was happening
when she gave the dog her hand to lick and her rings
came loose, her fingernails lifted and when the dog,
none-the-wiser, got sick, she left it to shit
everywhere, over every carpet in the house.

a four year old belongs to you—
no matter the weather—you wait
outside the launderette
— laid out
side stretch on cement
not longer than a yard
wires nestle
in rubber sockets
a life — arrested— must be
going on three months— fuschia
folded — caught by a chain— looping
yet frozen— someone
put you together with hopes high
each day I wonder— upright
splayed out— split open
— the day when we won’t
meet anymore— exhale
as I turn the corner
eyes land on you

sassy pink bicycle
my first bike — royal blue
training wheels tacked on—
of which you have none—
accomplished— the body waits—
polythene rope threads through
spokes— under tread—
to swing — off city
black diamonds pavement—
heart that plucks lavender
— faithful steed
raspberry runner —stilled
though hungry
for salt crusted palms
shrieks of legs to spit
out — how to stop this whooshing
cloud — air sun gravel—
hands cup pearly—
you are as real as fenestration
shadows stretching
on my two a.m. carpet
you are loved

1.
The local paper clears space for hope,
their photographer in Saturday corduroy,
issuing instructions from behind his Nikon,
my eight-year old foot steady on the shovel,
conkered hair tilting towards my father,
weekday suit swapped for white anorak,
a sapling in his hand, slotted in its hole,
a tooth placed in a gum, my tongue remembering.

2.
Thirty years later, nobody notes our names,
tripod angled on the pitch of my father’s drive,
the red boiler suit he lent me for the afternoon,
grubs of soil on his awkward, summer knees.
He cradles the silver trunk, the first of three,
blinking its garden-centre leaves in unfamiliar light.
This wordless afternoon, we’ll cut turf, tamp earth,
soothe trees upright. Gift them space to grow.

To hurt, as in: the act of letting pain occur, for someone else.
To invite, as in: to offload the choice
of who might actually attend your drinks event.
To swim, as in: the act of swimming you.

For, to know that you process the cold far better than me
has also been to learn that I will likely leave
the river with you floating in it still. 
To watch you splash about. To swim you, with my mind. 

Yes, I’m often squinting, oddly. And you’re finally getting out. 
There is literally nothing wrong with your hair at all.

At scout camp, I have
the misfortune of sleeping
bag-to-bag beside a short
boy that everyone has taken
a dislike to. I find myself
beside him in the lunch
queue, and even the urinal.
The tin trough, gurgling.
The splashback on our aqua-
shoes. The two seats of a
kayak fill with me and him
as kids twist across a lake
like well-fed ducks at play
with their capsizing. With
one safety knife between
the two of us, we’re made
to cut a dead trout down
its side-seams and pull out
all the fish guts. The boy,
with his good arm, chops
the head off. This seems to
make him happy; this seems
to make him want to place
a finger in the trout’s mouth
and goad it into puppetry.
Two months prior, a bike
crash had him sitting in an
ambulance, prodding the bone
that saluted from his forearm.
The nerve-ends: twinging in
return. The lone things our
bodies are held up by. Each
tendon. Every rope-swing. The
three teeth, missing from his
gumline. He says to sign his cast,
with an X – or something like
my surname. Not sure why
I’m being formal, but it counts.
Just moments from his skin.

You’re in his DMs I’m in the vestry
holding hands for serenity prayer.

Kissing at local strays, inviting them to follow me into
public bathrooms. Not in a sexy way

in a lonely way. Detachment loses its glamour
when you’re washed up-shore alone.

I spend hours each week saying my name into the phone,
listening for your likeness.

You call to ask if I want to join your group chat of
former women. Share experience.

You’re planning some kind of uprising
online. I tell you we’re none of us public figures and

I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. Time, shoot
through the hands

of my unmaking. I’ve got my own way of doing things
but I do wonder

who gets left behind. These men who have haunted
my twenties; stubborn spectres

pushing love away then complaining of loneliness
like it made them unique.

I won’t believe we’re the same. Neither now nor
never. That unlike you I saw it

coming and I never would have stayed.
Nothing can grow here. But I don’t know

how to stop the flood; our fates sewn into the swollen
riverbank, soaked through.

You might not believe me but I pray for us
on days it’s not too painful.

I complain so much today. The sky gives me backache. I moan
about the weather, the sheet-like flatness of the land like some biblical

backwater on a mural. In the Great Church of Breda, a mosaic
of expressionless saints gatekeep a tomb. I get up close to the gashed

stone by the knave, conjure the smithereened mask
of Mary and her faceless boy – a chipped, flaky thing.

The audio guide says the vandals waited all night in the cloisters,
were religiously committed to sabotage, a blunt pickaxe

concealed in their cloaks. The damage reminds me of the Y9 era
I spent gouging my mug from artefacts - laying down photos

on the fireplace, untagging myself, cropping a chunk of me
away. I craved the abyss of my face and the things that brought

it. I cannot bear what I’ve let speak for me. There’s still always
a sword pressing my cheek, a hollow I’m about to unfold.

      and his calves are lighthouses
                    from a strip of Portuguese coast,
                      and his hands
                           glaze up my sides
like flitches of sticky meat
     que fofo, he whispers
                       and his feet turn,
                             curl like tide
                                        Lukewards
my legs are lines hooked
                      to the port
                            of his back      his chest
                            drapes above
                            like a fresco cast
                                           in wet plaster
                                my heart: a gushing gravy
                                  boat

             and my doubts
      are snakebites on his wrists
                            that unravel in breath,
            to his hardness – a slipstream,
                               a wand of sugar glass
                                           and when he holds my neck
                                      like a swan,
                                                   I shatter

I pace around outside the entrance
of a building site, smoking, as he exits
his body on a strategically overstrained NHS
ward, from the same act’s lingering, cell-
altering effects. I admit the bleak irony
in reprising a stage of loss determined by
what you choose, also,
to keep doing. The fantasy of choosing
what’s done inside you
by your own hand, mortal,
dimming, like a match lit for no reason
but habit. As if it could connect us
across planes now. Later,
                                  hovering
                                  in the bath I’ve taken to
                                  spoiling myself in, I notice
                                  how my hastening heart rate
                                  sends reverberations, a rhythm, out
                                  of the scaffolding of itself and through
                                  the water, shifting inanimate
                                  detritus, and wonder
                                  if this throbbing could still
                                  move you
                                                    as we perform
                                                    the act of erosion
                                                    in harmony.

To adequately honour the Phoenicians, we strip our beds and gather our linens then boil them in communal pots of lavender. Only then can we begin to thank them for the pigment they invented. Legend says the colour drooled out of a dachshund’s mouth. Another says the gods wrung it drop by drop from an army of sea snails, twisting and pulling them down the shores of the Med. Others believe it was a ploy to win over a woman, who was ultimately unimpressed. Klein lathered his canvases with blue until the colour burned through the frame, poking small holes in the dress of the attendants. At night, curators tucked them under feather blankets. That’s how it goes. Sometimes your eyes are so green, I have to turn away from them.

– one –

it pulses like a fuchsia diamond,
above the old library and warehouses.
I push my forehead against the window:
whooooosh, ghost-rocket climbing

– two –

then the bang, the colour, the relief
that cause has effect, seed has flower

– three –

I feel it in my ribs, like how I feel a beat
just before my body jerks in a dream.
When I dropped my blue breakfast bowl,
in that brief moment

– four –

between it left my numb hand
and crashed down into milky ruins,
I was there, with it, falling through the air.
When she peeled and stuck electrodes
and wetted the metal and I shivered

– five – six –

I could only tell my body, I can’t stop this,
or stop you, but I will stay with you.
And, when they tell me to count to ten,
I know I will be

– seven –

under before we even reach

– eight –

In the end, she doesn’t ask me to count:
she says, imagine, you are in your favourite
place in the world. You are home.
I am in my flat with fireworks.

Six aisles later, you browse for girl dinner:
blue cheese, biscuits already in my arms.

You relax your pelvis at the plums, rustle
their balayage skin, first orange,

then rose. Each one finds its likeness
in you, the deepest iris, my darling

netting. My darling plastic netting,
to tear through you. The ones we tongued

before have spit themselves into pits
about an olive bowl. As for me, I am pears

for your hands, an experiment in raspberry
and water cracker. The two second slip

between cornichon and Chardonnay.
You, devilled eyes, too white to fry.

I would never dream to scald you, just
firm you nakedly in water slow to boil.

ignoring you as we cooked dinner,
the closeness of a done egg to its
knife. How, when you slice tomatoes,
your undeft hand blames the yolk.

Girl is so bored.
So unimpressed
styled goth.
And late. So never-
meet-your-hero
vibes. As usual
I glamorize. Water
where my marble
was. Nice to meet
you cracking AIDS
jokes. Commercially
minded your audience
singled out as fags.
Girl the bravado.
Your insta story
brags about fucking
a former student Pisces
after greasy ass baskets
of fried dive food.
I was there. I snap
shot and zoom in on you
cheersing a champagne
bottle to frame. The lonely
gore in drinking blood
full Lestat de Lioncourt.
Another vampire.
Your predecessor
giving me the dead
eyes. Like hey
big boy. Nice neck.
How housebroken.
My post-club culture
pump of pure blood
sober yet boring.
Your camouflage
mocks the packs
Lestat hunts. Born
to the woods.
From these parts.
Human suffering
disgusts you like
totally a turn off.
Girl is too cool. So
cavalier. Your appeal
in bougie bracelets
against bad juju.
Keeping me at arms
length. My veins
cave. I guess you
forget me. Typical
mythical bitch shit.
Boy-chaser. Mirror
fucker. Scene
stealing stunt
double. Lestat
howls from behind
our backs. Wolves
as if you’d know.
For your crusade
an armor of golden
crosses. Just one hanging
there from your neck.
Practically nothing
as we hug or shake
hands or whatever
kind of goodbye
stops us.
It’s your pretend
fangs that suck me dry.
Siring a dark gift
I’ll never want.
As if I were one
of your children
fleeing or left for dead.
Except I’ll never
visit New York. Text
you when I do. Alex
is a darling
penname. A front
for interviews.
The damned quoting
the damned.

It will be a warm day, a Friday, late afternoon.
My window will be open, and I will hear
my neighbour at the front of his house,
not far from me, cutting his lawn.

And I will be in bed, naked, waiting for you,
sheets thrown back, listening for your car,
legs and arms spread because of the heat.
And all the while, I will hear the mower.

It will stop and start, stop and start,
because, at the end of his garden,
at the low stone wall, my neighbour
will cut the engine, calculate the turn.

The lifeless machine will be shuffled
to the head of a new row, lined up,
the choke pulled, and he will begin again,
dragging perfect stripes behind him as he walks:

one light green stripe towards the house,
one dark green stripe towards the wall:
one light, one dark, one light, one dark,
walking in straight lines with his mower.

And his son will be playing one-man tennis,
knocking the ball against the garage door,
counting aloud how many times he can hit
and I will hear - Look at me, daddy! Look!

And the lawn mower will stop just for that,
and I will half-hear the praise, and then the boy
in the primary-school-blue cardigan will count
again, with the thud, thud, thud of the ball.

And I will be lying on my bed listening,
waiting for you to arrive - to come
into my house through the unlocked
side-door, and, when I hear your car,

I will also hear the mower faltering,
and you will come into my room barefoot,
trainers left at the bottom of the stairs,
your body tight as the strings on a racquet.

And I will spread wider in an act of welcome,
and you will be less than half my age,
and you will tell me that I am a goddess—
or that this is the afternoon that I will become one.

I dug up the beach and the sun held out for me. I collected clumps of sand the size of sunflower heads into buckets, patting their pen with my fingers. I wished them good fortune. Made a kingdom like one might a piece of origami – folded corners into towers, creased edges in the shape of a trundled bridge, a fanged gate, a dolphin flag. Each brick a silent prayer. 

The sun abandoned, the waves rang closer, a gaggle of lads found me, and laughed. I smelt their desire for domination mixed in with my own confused sex. They taunted. Said they were going to knock the castle down. They hung around in threats, milked the pathos, wanted me to cry, piss, swell. Call for mama. 

But I was alone against the sea with all her secrets. And the laughter plundered every cloud and coming star. In the world of divination I smelt their domination in domination I smelt their divination. I knew what was coming. Looked upon my prayers already eroding. 

I stomped my feet against the beach. Cracked beneath my heel was the head of my castle, the bridge whose face the sun had yawned into, the turrets and the gardens, the gate and the flag. Powdered into salt. Every dream, scrubbed. Futures chipped like teacups moaning on the sand. I prevented the theft of myself. And with it, my wishes waxy, cursed and foamy by the coming of the heavy drunken-gutted waves.

Watching myself through a half crown of mist 

	drawing across a bridge where a shepherd, 

a stack of bones like the tassels of birthday balloons, 

	says hello. He has horns atop his head, like question marks. 

Dogs for company. Y diawl does not do lonely. Gelert 

	I say through a breath clogged with winter. 

Gelert, I hymn to the yellow-eyed hounds, disguised if only 

	to show me my wrongs. I know he is within them, 

I know he has come here so I may never forget. I 

	will find my place behind the devil’s shoulder. 

a knife                     waiting                   three                          lined up
sleeps in                  for its                      times each                in
the bag                    moment                  day                             procession

heaving                   my legs                    I lie                            waxing
helpful                     like                          about                         like a
excuses                    a saltire                   love                           pigeon

on the                      blood                       the holes                   when I try
bathroom                in my                       that                            to remove
floor                         mouth                     I make                       you

the SOS                   her top                    in the                         recovery is
bus                           deck                        car park                     an infinite
stands                      a halo                      I died in                     watchtower

I looked beautiful when they found me face down
outside the dinner party, arriving to a brief sleep platform

on top of a Microsoft snow drift. To the other guests
I was a sound of heavy sloughing, briefly sleeping on my front,

unfamiliar patio pressed against me - a sad man
on a shared train. Your face on my inner thigh, I’ve seen you before

that 2010 news article about the holy toast. Faith - a last minute
airport souvenir. Apart from funerals, weddings

and Christmas synaesthesia, I have never gone to church, but I like it
when, together, we all sing.

Never the soft flesh of the lychee fruit, always the toxic pit.

Fizzy pop smoothed flat in a summer evening, sweat
is not desired beauty tactic. Breathing in the smog of a life is
not a desired beauty tactic. I have been known to be attacked
by the knowledge of myself.

I am not my swimming shorts, but rather a tick
feeding on my own thigh, expiring
under a palm slap. I would not recommend the taste of my own blood.
Five am showers drown out birdsong. Has anyone considered
the speed of light is simply too fast. I won’t sing, I can’t even talk. Sorry.

Conversation is communion
                   And communion is guilt. Everyone knows that

Or so they say. Who’s they?
I don’t know. We haven’t spoken in a long time.

Queer as in odd.
Queer as in strange.
As in, misplaced, out of place, out of body.
As in, saying unnatural when you actually
mean a little too natural, a little too close to
nature, a little too far from this world of
plastic and plaster that we’ve sealed ourselves
into.

Queer as in evening. As in twilight. As in the
2008 film Twilight, the awkward press tour
where Kristin Stewart squirms under flood
lights and sinks into a chrysalis for protection.
As in the concept of a chrysalis, when the
caterpillar or butterfly or both are so deep
in change that it’s just a bag of soup and
brains. As in bogs and swamps and woods
and moors, and those who live on the edge
of them.

Queer as in that aunt your mum mentions
sometimes with a mixture of exasperation and
awe, who lived all her life with her sister except for
one summer in the south of France, who shut her
front door one day and walked out and never
came back, spoon still in the sugar pot, oats
still in the cupboard.

Queer as in how there are always cowboys or nuns
or deckhands or ladies’ maids, how there’s
always a reason for two guards to stay up all night
watching the horizon. As in all the good married ladies
who remember their best girl friend and the way her
hair fell just so when she laughed. As in the Romans
and their many excuses to sit naked in each
other’s company.

Queer as in Orlando. As in Mrs Dalloway. As in
the way I looked at myself in the mirror that
first day I realised. As in the feeling you get when
you read back over what you’ve written and spot
the links you couldn’t see before popping up
like mushrooms in a perfect circle.

Rain is water defined by collapse: step over the sheets, they assert the moment it brilliantly fell. In this way absolute accords with air. It arrives facelessly with a firm handshake, but when touched, slides over your skin. It hunts the rung-true air, hoofbeats flowers in road-dust, crosses cities as a bunch of keys searching for a lock. The same loop of evening plays at the point the news changes from past to future, and each family for a moment considers the temporary obliteration of the map. You’ll hear its speech from the storm drain, printed out later as leaves.

Only I sit at the Tenth Avenue café we’d do breakfast
the morning after, stuttering when the waitress asks
if you’re on your way. Nobody but you remembers
languid bike rides along the Willamette, how we’d
stop and sprawl on the riverbank to appraise
the joggers as they zipped by in skintight spandex.
It was you, cowboy hat askew, beckoning me
with swinging hips to the dance floor as Whitney Houston
blasted around us at a Hongdae bar. You standing naked
at the mirror, me changing the sheets as we discussed
if we’d invite that night’s third to bed again.
No longer will you grin coyly, leaning against the wall
of a grungy Hell’s Kitchen club, and whisper into my ear
how I should approach the clean-cut bartender because
he wasn’t your type though he shared a haircut and build
with your last ex. It’s half past three. I down
my last dregs of cold coffee and leave. Fathoming how
love is not love without the contingency of grief.

I remember the semi-trailer swallowing the hood of my mother’s red Cutlass Supreme. Everything moving in slow motion as the bed slid closer and closer to the windshield. My feet moved like molasses cakes, trying to scramble back, backward, over, away, but the seatbelt held me tight. It was Christmastime and we were delivering a turkey to our cousins. It thawed in the backseat for hours while police investigated the scene. The truck dragged us 50 metres and only the size of mom’s land yacht saved us. We gridlocked traffic for four hours the Saturday before Christmas and it was the first time I saw my mother cry on cue. “Men can’t stand it when women cry,” she told me and winked. I was 10 years old. The next time I saw her do that was when the police came to the door the night my father died.

1662 The gratification of gossamer desire
         was centuries-manured into her
         Vauxhall plot: bridge & boat crowd
         had flocked to find senses titillated
         by restauranteurs, rope walkers
         in revealing leg-wear transporting
         them to stars & rent boys in rustling
         arbours returning them to gutters.

1862 She scrunched her skirts & squatted
         in a corner of what had once been
         playground of kings (& queens);
         there she remained—hem blackened
         by road junction, brickwork ribbed
         like crinoline & colour of piss stains
         —a tavern royal only in name.

1962 The queens returned with servicemen
         from frontlines. She welcomed them
         —maintaining a merkin of legality
         with hymen between stout-sipping
         pensioners & female impersonators
         synching & strutting a kidney-curve bar.

1987 Optics sightlined & stage centre-set
         for Savage put-downs, she fought
         bigot-gloved bobbies as she fought
         all viruses—capitalism especially—
         at each proud tit an underpuppy;
         she became Boudicca-upon-Thames.

2012 Well, what do we think she was doing,
         squatting in South London slum land?
         Shit is a nutrient; water-closet rude bits,
         wash out wildness & weird insects,
         you get Gail’s growing in straight lines;
         this a good gardener overstands.

2024 Even warrior queens can fall, in the end;
         that Capital is a cunning one—milking
         the old girl for all she’s got under cover
         of having her strapped to supporting
         machines—when all she needs, really
         is a sneaky ciggie, a swig of gin & to feel
         that filthy laugh rattling her doors again.

When drunk on visions, you professed to me
that “it was only right” your neck should bulge,
for all the necklaces and vanities
of which you, in your reckless prime, indulged.
I’d never know, ascetic now you are.
Remind this lapsing nun your ancient ways.
The matins rushing past your Vespa’s bars —
our vinted dawn. From ash comes sudden shade.
Your lauded miracles held not a glim
to all our secret toasts. The waters’ rise
in your absconce just proves my sext can’t swim —
it’s said you only meet somebody twice.
             Unlike you, death’s terse for me — or will be.
             I can’t get old; my sisters... they would kill me.

The kids had it right: feverish
under bleachers, sweating out straight
decades of repression in poorly fitted 
sports bras and dollar store boxers -
when we poured our lips 
into those sickly teenage kisses 
we were the wisest we have ever been. 
Remember how sex felt like the fog
between our fingertips, how
we stared out at it, shy of its shiver yet
heatsick with waiting, aching for it
to kiss our sunburnt necks. I think 
you were misted, then, smoke-drunk,
wasting away evenings with the first girl
to promise her hands to your ribs 
but who these days is making out like that?
Like the nine to five is a distant vision,
like the concert’s just ended and we 
are all frizzed-up hair and tinnitus -
who is loving by cellphone torchlight
with that high school timelessness? 
It could be us, my impatience 
and your lazy river drawl. Come,
Our kitchen is ready for hunger.
Let us knead our floured lips
together against the linoleum
until we exhaust ourselves out of fucking, 
leaving crescent moon echoes
in your cinnamon-dusted shoulderblades.

1.
It’s one minute past midnight
the sky folds its shirt over a balcony.
Three flights of trees and underneath
a tramline. You thought you’d be a good friend for once
to the sad girls of the balcony
to the tealights and the rye
to the stem broccoli.

2.
Now you are on a tram passing West
past a tower called Alex goodbye Alex
we got the trees and the heartlands
the young men
guarding the heartlands.

3.
Slab a new sky.
Meatier now not skinnier.
A basement bar
a streetlamp counting the cars on the highway.
Here is a slot for a new heart
here is a chest
a pair of lungs
here is the hinge
that locks the cubicle.
Here are six men
waiting for your mouth.

4.
And the light stands frameless over the door
touching your jeans
now on the floor.
Each man that enters here is a balcony
looking East.
A country that’s lost its name.
A family tree chopped to the ground
where your knees get dirty.

The sluttiest thing a man can do
is have a clean bathroom. Tonight,
I want to get so loved up I can’t see

straight, you forget my name. The word
atrium is Latin for entrance hall. Holding
eyes with beanied strangers gets me going.

I’ve rotted at restaurants, corpsed under
streetlights. I’ve cycled to cinemas in loose
skirts. What is want but three half pints

sunk. I rabbit to their level. Right now,
I’m greying up the duvet. Cutlery sleeps
unrinsed in the sink. Smears on the window

coat the whole moon, the sun. Maybe I want
to be taken care of. Maybe I’m not an initiator
of any kind. Venus is the hottest planet

in our solar system.
Its heatwave never ends.

For his birthday, I buy
Gabe a set of rocks glasses

with soapstones and a bottle
of Lake George whiskey.

Alone in my bedroom
downstairs, he thanks me,

but won’t meet my eyes.
There’s something you want

to say, I say. Outside he looks
me over, though his friends

can’t tell in the dark—
flood light shades the yard.

His bocce ball falls into the
gully so I hold his hand,

lower him down to retrieve it.
Dirt covered shorts, now,

and it’s so humid—he pulls off
his shirt. Knows what I want.

And he’s a showoff. A good one.
In bed, finally, I leave

my door unlocked. You’re my
best friend, he tells me

on the highway home.
The best, he says. The best.

Lie like a
cut worm

a dead emperor

an eyelid

lie like the face in 
someone else’s head
lie like

bark
the gaze on the bark

the unthinking thought on
the gaze on the bark.

The cold feels refreshing
against what remains bare of our bodies,
now a symphony of scents.
We give each other notes, then laugh,
slings his arm around my shoulder
to change topic. The side of his torso
is soft, I didn’t notice it then, his hand
encompassing mine.
This is all temporary, anyway,
so we wait for the cycling man
to blur past us before
we kiss, slower this time,
no one to tell us to focus.
I expect to taste him,
the other, back in his flat
cleaning up after
our mess: the spilled water,
the broken coffee table,
the wet doctor’s notes,
the half empty bottles
secure in darkness all over again.

“She led us through Westphalia, a congregation
weaving down the Rhine like a many-headed snake”

              “we were ambushed by bandits, a great force”

“riding horses like arrows ride wind”

“crashing down the hillside like an avalanche”
                          “a collapsing dune”

“the valley filling with bodies
and the flashing of swords in sunlight”

“she demanded an audience with their leader”
             “Ursula tried to escape”
                            “her eyes bright as pole stars”
“her gaze turned groundward”
“defiant”
                          “obliging”

“... but she was killed in cold blood”

“our Little Bear...”

“her chest a hollowed barrow”

“we ran with no food but the maggots in our wounds”

“there is nowhere to hide
             a fox in every hole, lugworms in every burrow”

“willows brush the riverbank
                                                   a canopy of reflections”

“we have our faith”
         “we have each other”
                      “we have until dawn”

“... when your enemy besieges you, you will eat your own children,
the flesh the Lord has given you...”

“we followed Ursula through Christendom,
eleven thousand daughters
                         with Christ alone as her husband”

            “all roads lead to Rome and all rivers
to the sea”

“I send this with the hope that the current carries it to you”

“Sister, I send my love”
                                                                                “my regret”
                                       “my testimony”

“and remember
we are only ever one breath apart”

Byzantine trading card game:
you taught me maths and materialism,
how to rule the school economy with a cardboard fist,
closing deals behind the bike shed.

You taught me to use what I have to hand,
that faith in small things – the luck of the draw, friendship –
might be rewarded.

Even now, I’ll play a round,
laying out Spell, Trap, and Monster cards:
colour swatches of my childhood.

Grass stains on summer shorts.

Lighting violet candles for Lent.

The faint yellow of a bruise
that is close to healing.

Boy as in the smell of freshly mown grass. Flies in your eyes. Sunrise
but not sunset. Boy as in the divine right of kings. The retaking of constantinople. As in
the taste of childhood nostalgia on my tongue. Except it’s sour like skittles.
Boy as in wearing mum’s high heels. Feeling so tall. As in drawing on the walls in green
highlighter. The arrangement of the flowers on the dining room table. Bent. Boy as in
not quite man. As in not not girly. Boy as in Princess Di’s sweaters. The smell
of the train on a four hour ride. Boy as in mud on your knees. Sweet
like vimto. Fizzing like balloons popping on the dancefloor. Boy as in the softness of
peaches. The creases of the leather sofa. Sticky. Boy as in skinny dipping in cold, cold water.
Nosebleed on the floor. Almost filling out the space. One droplet at a time.

I knew it the morning the dogs were hanged,
one rope taut across the bridge, two quiet
lodestones. I knew then to look hard and quick
before the rope was cut, the bodies swept off
to Leicester or some place of old industry.
to see it is to tell it later, to promise.
their boney backs, how all denied hearing
which man did it, which barn door grinned open,
which chorus of kids watched from the knoll
where they made out with peachy doppelgangers.
I left when my dreams began itching, prickled
by the burr of a noose, a gulping fall —
             through their softly eyes, through necks askew,
             the dogs would have seen each other, too.

The freedom I habitually ascribe to you—I don’t have
those kinds of categories at my disposal. Travel and fashion,
but it’s the facility of thought, not just the nouns at play.
The question of personality first arose in New Mexico.
Would we form our own school, and whom did our circle
circle around? When we hiked up into the saddle at night,
did we all go? Pete—from Ithaca, NY who drove drunk—
read Plato and bought a low-slung ranch he invited us to—
those of us who couldn’t afford to fly home for anything
less than semester break. I cracked my forehead open
playing football in his yard, and it was the kind of split
we none of us could get past. I did visit Chris once
in Corpus Christi, and it was as if we had never,
even though it had been two years. And the next anybody
heard of Chris he had married uncomfortably young.

Take something
you said to me in front of the unlocked.
Later on I thought about that.
How the light came through the window as if violently thrown,
and it lay there with its shadows
across your body—like a net, sure, but like a scaffold.
How many years since then, and I still
look on what we made?

The city juts at the edge of the desert.
It rains every day at three o’clock for fifteen minutes
like a manager sponging the forehead of his fighter.
There were many ways the desert laid claim.
Sunlight there has a way of moving, always ahead of you,
illuminating things you can’t see
by staring out into the desert.
Of course I took it. Why else would I be telling you this?

A battle is fought, again, in its memory. Its widowed
lovers, and echoes of shells. The songs. Ours was
a war like any other: youthful, private. With time,
I came to remember best that easy summer
just before—he was soft, covered in gold
fuzz, its wiry ends holding each to a drop
of blue as he stepped out from the water—
their recollection, each, a story kept
of their nation, the larger sea;
his calves, the battlefield.
Our age a brutish storm:
courage came to us
piecemeal, and slowly
in its smallest gestures—
dinners after marching,
kissing on the marble steps;
the patchwork spoils of struggle,
our brave and tender intimacy.

I thought I'd never see these pinions / go grey / I admit / you get a little tired of the same old tropes / my mister's eyes are nothing like / the ninth largest object in the solar system / all the boys these days with their cheeks / smooth like wheeled clay / stretch your talons / fill my cup / look for heroes / on the dancefloor or at the bar / in the undergrowth / build a neat little nest from all these fictions we gather / but do you remember those claws / on your shoulders? / would you like to buy me a drink?

stop trying / to tie your tides to fashion / that moustache will never work / there's still time for a god to fold me into the stars / people will tell you it's cold out there / that no one could take flight / holding me in his arms / but that's the deal / Ganymede / trust me – you wouldn't want to be on an urn forever / and I should be enough / to carry his lightning / no, don't speak / just look me in your eagle eyes / put this beak in your hands and polish / tell me what stares back at you

Jump-start. Write as poem as fast as you can.
Write a poem with your other hand.
Make me feel something.
Tell me about the time you were wandering a desert
and came across a worn, weathered statue.
Tell me about the first time you found yourself
in the pilot seat of a giant robot,
ready to defend your city. We don't have the time
for the usual preparations, or the loading of our atomic fuel.
Make something happen
and change my life. Quickly.

Write a poem from another perspective.
Tell me how us monsters feel
when we start marching towards your doom.
Personify autumn.
Personify the age. Write a still life
or try to turn your last tantrum into a villanelle.
Make a full stop sound like a train pulling away,
for me. Show me all the moves you can do
from inside that machine
as strong as a building.
Give me something profound, forthwith.
Show me your giant sword.

Put down on paper that poem you lost
when you tried to translate the idea
into a computer. Write the poem
while standing upside down.
I want to see where your thoughts take you,
I want you to inhabit a wandering mind.
Show me you can do anything you want
with your head up here in the clouds.

Find me a rhyme for, oh, I don't know,
Godzilla, maybe. Aren't you sick of defeating him, yet?
Don't you ever get tired
of wrestling otherworldly beings to the ground
with your artificially enhanced strength?
Show me where the emergency exit is
inside this thing. Pull that lever for me. Do it now.

September vines.
In my palms, freshly
plucked grapes. Baskets passed around
from hand to hand. A mythology
of white vests and gold chains
rolling time into a smoke.

Pork chops brown, dripping
fat over embers. Children shoot
index fingers at each other, feigning
death against a metal fence, theatrics
of Tupperware lids about to unclip.

None of this is in the photograph.
Through the lens, I’m the boy trying
to figure out the best way to
manufacture a smile.

Arms camouflaged
around my cousins’ shoulders — out of frame
a barking you’ll never get to hear.

n. a species that triggers a lifelong passion for birding
                                                     —The Audubon Dictionary for Birders

1

             A male singing on dunes,
                                 the blog says, was the towhee propelling
                     Dave’s interest in bird-watching. Joel could hear them
cooing. His mum taking him to the rooftop to see iridescent
                                                      pigeon necks wrestle
                         over breadcrumbs. Spark bird, first bird, since I heard
                                   the words, I cannot stop
                                             reading the stories of these men who allowed themselves
                                                                               the pleasure of looking
                                                                                                              unabridged.

2

                                                                                   Boy across the road
                           whose beauty was an early childhood
                                                   spent in America or boy whose brother taught us
                                                                       how to jerk off
                                            (instructions all wrong) or boy in fancy dress I chased
                                                                    across tables for the length of a restaurant meal,
                                                                            age 9 or 10,
                                                                                  whose was the first
                                                                                                               plumage I laid
                                                                                                                                eyes on?

3

                     Rose Garden sundown, men step into a pond
                                                   of shadows, craning like swans,
                                                              looking at what they are
                                                                                      not meant to
                                                                                               look at
                                                                                  during the day. White
                                                                                     petalled bush; hesitant,
                                                                                                  a finger emerges
                                                                                                                       pointed
                                                                                                                                at me.

but right now you are scared.
your sweating thighs are flared in fear

from wanting to stay here.
would that be so bad? here & rife?

I have prayed all this life
away from heaven, knife to fist

like antlers splitting mist
open, their corpses kissed & fed:

hundreds of elk found dead
in Wyoming ahead of dawn.

Mouths spread in rotting yawns,
orange-acid lichen drawn inward,

wormed to dirt clump, toward
time’s ending, where adored we die

holy. See how your thighs
fold into knowing, my dear; all

of this one earth will call
us to clots after all our nights

together. after spites
& small worries, not-quites, long thens,

eat all the wrong things then
go to the wrong heaven, my dear.