My Father’s Job Book
Rippled by snow, the cover’s blue rose into crests. At nine, he drew it from the sideboard drawer. Scrubbed, late…
An excerpt from Beyond Elsewhere
From Beyond Elsewhere by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, forthcoming from White Pine Press in March 2016, translated from the French by…
Twofold Bay
1930 Then the curved tooth snaps with the tug of rope in Old Tom’s jaw as the Davidson’s whaling boat…
Difficult Cup
after Wu Hao’s Duke Cups The china cup is frilled at the rim like tired lace and all over…
Creachann/Scallop
Creachann Na samhraidhean ud, choisicheadh Dad sinn sios dhan eighre ann an Àrnol: sgrùdamaid sgoid ’s propach ’s canastairean…
Girl in the Blue Pool
I am years back and full of echoes. Chlorine, urine, raucous cuff of voices on broken surface. A boy…
Gobha nan Glasan/The Locksmith
Gobha nan Glasan Tha eòlas ann am buth gobha nan glasan air Bread St o Theodore à Samos, o…
Refugees by Manash Bhattacharjee
Refugees I know a thing or two about refugees – As a child I heard father say, “We were sleeping…
Independence Day by Manash Bhattacharjee
Independence Day (15th August, 1947) The day had turned out to be A feast for vultures Every Muslim and Hindu…
Pterodactyl
We sail, loose-kneed over murky jade water towards Terrapin Point. Our blood-red ponchos cling to our bare arms. You…
Breathless In Jerusalem
Here in the Municipal Garden – all white paths and straggly flowers – asphalt’s hot beneath one’s feet, baked…
81 Sturla Road
Poor world, the violet insect-o-cutor glow of streetlights on the fallen snow is something like my need of him…
The Memory Of Touch
A moth falling, landing in my lap, as she then says. ‘Don’t worry, they worry me too, these moths,…
Epithalamium, with Squirrels
for Liz and Bob Saw this, today, and thought of you two: there, not there, the quantum flicker of…
Being Kept by a Jackdaw
At a country fair a couple called Dave and Di Nelstrop Came from Bow, in Devon, to sell tansy…
Translucence
:with time the skin thins; we become more see-through as if the drip —————-of it, passing, was diluting us.…
In The Late Night Cafés Of Despair
I have waited for them, the uncommitted, the deceivers, in those strip-lit archipelagos of uncleared tables, ketchup bottles, smears…
The Blue Bench (a pantoum)
Just for a little while I thought it was you on an old blue bench in the park there…
Trodden Before
From a sequence inspired by a five-page factual report of an Irish Colonel in the Indian Army 1916-1946. …
Notes For Landscape Painters
Knoydart September 2014 Smooth the barbs of night with forsaken stars; snag the waning sea its mackerel feather…
It’s generally kind
I brought round books and then we just sat in the living room and watched a documentary on silver-backed…