For a week I went to bed knowing she’d called forgetting she’d left her voice in that space between us. “I’m calling randomly not knowing the time difference ignoring where you are.” When I was ten you bought me a piano you played it so well while what I wanted the most […]
Old Love Trapped in a Pasty
After all that time I could have ended up thinking I had invented you, but I dived and found your old letters from Cornwall. Glued together they form a lifebelt which inflates when I sigh. Desperately warm was the microclimate on the Isles of Scilly, but once back in cold London, I took a […]
Lady Di Died Yesterday
Imagine, it’s morning, my rusty Raleigh hissing with anger, sliding on Station Road, darting along by red-eyed Cambrians who are crying for Lady Spencer. If nothing ever changed the trains would have run late, but that day the tea-lady shook her old wig no. Punting was only for tourists and undergrads; writing, grading, […]
A Bouquet of Ephemerals
On your first day among us, you ate my Barbie doll. I cried when I saw the pink leg sticking out of your mouth, without knowing it would only be a few years until I buried that one-legged doll with you. Born a Saint Bernard you felt at home among our garden blooms. […]
Invisible Mothers
Moriana: where they are from their mothers’s shadow is a sheet of tracing paper on either translucent side a mother and a daughter can neither be separated nor look at each other. * Argia: where she is from mothers have no warmth no smiles no skin nothing that makes them seem mothers except […]
Weaning
It’s in hunger that I write best about you, mother when you don’t look above my shoulder presentable you are absent or else you appear your mad gaze searching for my readiness to admire but I was not born to approve of you, mother. It’s in hunger that I remember best how your […]