Poetry

(R.I.P. Derek Walcott: January 23, 1930 – March 17, 2017) Deep seas of yesteryears wash new froth on your home shores. Egrets, sea gulls, circle the...

I It’s just the same old air a person breathes, roughly the same respiratory system, steady compared with ours, the same idea of hindrance (flesh the breath must...

Over a cup of Marco Polo And a bowl of bird's nest soup, Listening to the world as a whole Through the particular, I laugh Into the telephone...

There is nothing in this room for those who have not learned to sing without thinking, who don’t know where the music fits in their bodies, how to...

After Alison Watt, ‘Venus’ (2015) Their backs against the grass, she felt a pull, as if the leaves on the trees were lodestones, the hairs on her skin...

There’s a stream by the Avon ward Where I stand to watch the water flow And unwind the whirlpools of my mind When it’s dark I let...

for SECH   Clare would have called these five red kites circling above dead or stag’s-headed oaks like iambs broken from a line of English pastoral by a name that signifies a deed...

To sing the evening home, the lover prepares a pot of lentil stew – her phone lighting up to the news of love’s imminent arrival, imagining her lover’s...

  He was patient as a dead bird. He perched on the ledge of bottom and rocked.  He was the missed flight. He was silence calmed down. He loved...

Weekends, growing up, I'd watch my father as he sat on a low stool in the veranda surrounded by half a dozen pairs of shoes, their laces...

We look up, & beyond the maple trees & the brick steeples with weathervane roosters, clouds billow as sleeping monsters. Not the sort of billowing that clouds...

Excerpts from a previously unpublished sequence of poems named The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar. February there is a white pigeon opened like a book on the...

i. labrador duck  Sitting at a disrespectful distance— ---------back where they came from—gets defensive when blinking (like only ---------shepherds have a right to). welcoming wreckage to its homeland by ---------sailboat...

An archaeologist in Greece unearths Aristotle’s Tomb; others dispute the evidence. If Aristotle’s ideas are consulted, the archaeologist Needs to prove, the tomb’s where he claims it, Not...

The London Magazine has been celebrating the life of our former editor, Alan Ross. An important figure in the literary world, Alan was known...

Above whitewashed, tabby-haunted Kamari, I wearied of the incessant inversions in Pope’s Homer, and left my self-improvement’s cooling terrace to the night, now drawing in here too, across...

On the wicker chair I wait for the duvet’s rise: you’re just a mound, breath, as I worry over why, again, you’ve overslept. Could it be early...

I only like imaginary men, the ones who think my art is the most transporting thing they have ever seen, and I am exactly as hilarious as I actually, actually am. Even then,...

Response to Finding a Fossil at Writhlington Coal Batches: A Fossil (a Fern) on Writhlington Batches Re-Take (Pt.II) Time not as we know it but another time...

When we stole the eggs from the barn that June  you said we held life in our hands.  Untrue I said as I carried a near...

As a man under a restraining order Still follows his ex about from day to day I stalk your shadow as if you could show up In...

I grow lighter for you with each striptease from skin to skin leaving a glimmering bulb a milk light by your bed for you to undress by or find your...

First published in The London Magazine, October/November 1989 Deep in the Scented House Deep in the scented house, a herring merchant is parting his wife's buttocks with cold hands; while...

The clouds have swum down from the sky and rolled onto their backs in the streets, begging for someone to rub their fluffy bellies A day...