Category: 2012

Disraeli Street   Ben Disraeli never knew he named the street I lived in, before the Empire struck out.   Draughty villas faced the front, mismatched teeth with green between; red roofs, green roofs; no one had thought yet of blue – why would they?   Trees truncated, hedges honed…

TUBABABY   Sleeping with the tuba her one small predilection its old brassy hump and battered valves   coil upon coil of intestinal tubing for that low sound her call to arms   how she loved its wide open bell as it spouted oompah like an elephant with bilge on…

Memoir II   Preparing for death is a wicker basket. Elderly women know the road.   One grandmother worked in munitions, brown bonnet, red stripe rampant. The other, a washerwoman: letters from the Front would surface, tattered.   You must take the journey, ready or not. The old, old stream…

1 | 2 Souvenir Sundays   Chickens scratch the same dirt a clock ticks off the hours. The flush of a passing car then a silence that turns my head. I settle back into green vinyl back to Sunday Times distraction. Smiling photos from WOMAD drummers, tall flags flapping a…

1 | 2 Mangaia, the oldest island in the Pacific   A friend told me her family lived on Mangaia for a year when she was young. Her mother   rode her scooter into a taro swamp chasing Stubby the pig. Taro swamps were everywhere   she said and blimmin’…

Working the Tang, Birsay These women are wrapped for the weather. The fleece of long-nosed black sheep so knitted into their skin, when their men undress them there is often a little blood.   The weather wraps them in gales of Arctic ice. They gather seaweed: tremendous heaps of tang…

1 | 2 Stranger things The story of things that won’t be whipped, the stories which have tripped you like the baby on your doorstep. There was a stange noise, you’d opened, the dog’d strained nearly toppling the drawer in which it slept. Then the egg and the cream, and…

1 | 2 Hungry Planet Switches are turned off power refused a study of small island team players reports touch rugby and bullrush are likely. In a hurry who knows to the commuter train I fall on the thought that every dinner is the portrait of a household – my…

1 | 2 Skinless, boned   Mack comes back to me, picks me up from Rehab after the passing-out parade. He’s always there, like weather. He’s got a butcher shop. I feel like skinned meat, raw, no cover. Everything hurts: sky, tarmac, traffic. I don’t know how to negotiate television…

1 | 2 Carnifex   Cattle are stunned, slaughtered, bled and gutted then the carcass comes to me. Trade school called it exsanguination and evisceration. My Girl loves them words. She’s my tenderloin: the choicest cut, free from fat. I could cleave a carcass into its primal cuts with my…