Jackson

Your faded black trousers look like charred treetrunks. Your eyes are like shy leaves. Above them floats your white hair, like a vague afternoon moon. I put my hand on yours: rough bark. You breathe slowly: wind in dry branches. You say something: a crow or a saw. You’re a still man in a stirred-up… Read more

This year I won’t stand under the railway bridge when the trains are going across, she said, even though it thrills me so, the adrenaline secret of the huge metal body roaring above me. This year I won’t, won’t, she said, because every time I do it, the thrill is a little smaller, the thrumming… Read more

yoga, said the teacher, translating a sutra,      is the mind      focused      on one      thing      alone fingers on keys eyes on screen      thoughts      in the breaths      that make a      thing      a poem First published in foam:e Read more

with      I don’t know how      to talk to you my clothes on First published in foam:e Read more

I dreamed I had a stillborn baby and it was a baby girl but she was just a lump of flesh really and my mother had organised her into a box with an address label something like To Death 15 Death Avenue Somewhere First published in foam:e Read more

as he talks he blinks the eyelashes touch the soft slope above the cheekbone and yet again —oh not again!— i’m lava from womb to larynx An earlier version of this poem was published in Poetry for Public Transport Read more