Poetry

OctoberPizza bruschetta gold dress Rioja Autumn is here and Winter forgotten Walking through town arm in arm with a lover Moon in the sky and leaves good...

This is not throwing plates, how you ask me. Too late for that. This is a whisper dissection. Thisis a beggar’s hand in my mouth. This is...

Little hole little well of dark staining the lacquer of my tooth little confessor coming close and coming closewhy are you pursuing me interrogator of the nerve in its...

SnowboundCarriages lit and still between the drifts ... With each flake it took on a new form, the city they seemed exiled from --- almost a sad,...

SUFFER THE COUNTRY Suffer the curled up corpses of the tortured Suffer the cluttered ranks of the bound and the beaten Suffer the pleading eyes of those...

My Father was a boxer. He taught me how to box when I was nine. This commonality, and the need to impress him, informed a great deal. When Charles Bukowski at an event asked me to ‘take it outside’ over a girl, I said okay. I was 21 and shy. Everyone at the party kept telling him [...]

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...

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...

Don’t believe the lies: Joseph was a randy little sod. That’s why we had to leave, go back to Bethlehem where he told his family I was pregnant with...

SynopsisPeople are taking sedatives in boats Going to America. Their names drift back to me— Hollowed out, unpronounceable. I walk through the crowds in the arcades And on the...

For Najwan DarwishA lucky three-year-old Is Saher* Abu NamousIf Gaza didn’t explode The world would have Known nothing of himNow he is all in reports One among the...

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,...

Exile“I rested my mouth on your memory” ~ Yannis Ritsos, from Diaries of ExileNight arrives like a cart You push it with motionless hands There is darkness But...

prophets have retired so do not wait for yours to come to you ~ Ashraf Fayadh (translated by Mona Kareem)In our country, a prince, Dara Shikoh, had...

Evening LightBrave bat in a bowler hat Blood shot eyes question What time does this light Depart?The light descends elsewhere Its shadow rising here The bat changes into an...

RepleteEnough of beauty - I have devoured small boats curtseying at anchor, green palace-dotted hills swarming the spice-scented shore of Asia Minor.I couldn’t chew another mouthful of waves,...

Woman “It’s easy, impossible, hard, worth trying.” ~ Wislawa Szymborska, “Portrait of a Woman” (1976)She is intimately attached To night and day. Only...

Today it’s snowing, snowing In Istanbul, Stamboul, Constantinople, New Rome, Byzantium. The city has mislaid its Jews And most of its Greeks. The bones of its Armenians Are long scattered. Somewhere far...

They live inside the warmth of typing fingers, inside the ghostly glass of hidden years you wanted to implant inside this week. The doors and windows to...

Iain TwiddyCoot It didn’t need to be a big ripple nudging its reed-nest for the overstep to plop into the up-plump of the breast,and the coot to...

from Norwegian / oh love, doesn't the fact that the world is so big, / laid out like ripe fruit / make you want to stay? / from Arabic / how I long to cleanse you / in the waters of the Tigris / how I long, as though you were a small and / priceless artefact, / to take you in my arms / from Ant-speak / I will carry you carry you / through legions of grass / protect you from the thumb, / the sole; the eager-feathered bird / will not swoop for you / from American / love is just love, and I'm in it / for the ride, o.k.? that tells me just exactly

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...

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

April doesn't rain. We have spent days watching the truant magpies comb our cat-eyed neighbour’s lawn for bottle caps and burnt-out tin foil. The cloying sun has not coaxed...