my bones press too hard at joints and wear through fibres
till even my pretty elbow peeps out where it rubs at threads
snuggled like capillaries, snapping and fraying — a pretty elbow pokes
out of the muscle of our entangled lives the evening you stand behind me
close enough to breathe on my neck and see the pale, exposed bone
send a shiver down my arm — you tuck your finger into the hole
and stroke my pretty elbow to let it know you know — in the morning
I choose a patch — I’ve kept our old shirts and jeans, scraps
I cut a circle of shell brown and with pricks of pink, stitch down a pattern
like cats tongues, overlapping the loving that mends us
From With Love, (Live Canon, 2020) first published by I'll Show You Mine Journal after being shortlisted by Andrew McMillan
wordsmith from drystones
do you miss the fulmar shriek
hail-ice at sea
the limpet stack?
you’re on the fen now
call out loud
call full-throated
we need a miracle
we need to heal
our planet would a-wounding-go
the people are a-weeping
& drought is coming
women are closing up like bivalves
women are clustering their babies
how did you pray up the storm?
horses & armour chasing you down the estuary
foam & force & wicked fear
you prayed in a cave
more of a lowly scrape in the dunes
cut off on the spit
how did you pray up that storm?
if wanting is enough
I’ll be the wilked wave & bruise the sky as I toss up
the enclosures
of the sisters of the wives of the mothers of the muses of
whatever they’re calling us
I want to be a wilked wave
wash away every address in a skeet sea
reeve the land
until Ely floats again &
in Cambridge rowers will scull dons to a new shore
far above the bridge of sighs &
I will swim down
into the library of climatology
where octopus computers are tethered
flickering
their one bewildered eye
after all, they knew —
water is the story
no matter the Mars men
let them rocket & waste up the speckled sky
wordsmith
flanked by the bright shells of astronauts
tell me
if we could humble ourselves
flatten our bodies out
on the fen
like water does
what prayer is there now
that could lift up the ground on one side & pool us
& quickly
Kiss My Earth, (Blue Diode, 2025) First published in EcoTheo Review, Summer 2020.