I think of old friends

and wonder will I meet

who I was when my feet

touch the granite

Outside

The rain whispers

Playing counterpart to the sounds

Inside

There are ghosts of us dancing:

Your bones grin at me.

My bones grin back at you.

Except for the mantis,

they do not pray.

Long has it stood

and spanned a river. Long have I waited

for you to bridge my ignorance.

I buy my mom flowers

instead of seeds,

though I want to buy seeds.

And plant them.

And grow a father from the soil.

The first to fall were the birches, just as beguiling when horizontal.  The world was unconcerned.

                Most of the time,

it’s too hard to have a body:

bones break, muscles tear, ankles turn.

because I am one. We all are. Big empty corridors filled with lilting melodies and cobwebs where dust motes and dead insects have been caught and strung up for the all ghosts to see.

I did not know that about your grandmother

When I wrote the scene with the brunch

                                                                     Are

your days distinguished? Or are they gathered

in blocks — a week slips away, a month here

with nothing that marks today

It’s the opening night reception and the place is packed. Most of the visitors face each other, not the paintings, little groups of glittering guests in their Friday-night finery, wine in plastic cups. The din is ecstatic—we need more fiber art.

I see the quivering leaves

and I remember you, feather-light fingers

brushing across my skin

“Like petals,” you breathe,

We practice at night

because disaster always comes

when everyone is sleeping,

Every month we followed Dad to the driveway and watched the delivery man haul another machine into the living room. There was a rowing machine and a stationary bicycle and an elliptical. Dad named them after women I didn’t recognize, always from the first half of the alphabet.

Do you mind?  I came here for the view & you're staining the menu.

Mum frowns at my ‘Smash the Patriarchy’ hoodie, tells me to say hi to Granny, hands me yet another foraged-fruit crumble in a twee wicker basket. She’s the first veggie to win SuperChef and tonight’s her date with the guy who won MeisterSinger. I imagine my dad – whatever he looks like – seeing the pictures, letching over what he’s missing. As I wave from the gate, Mum’s dishing out treacle-drizzled traybake amongst the paparazzi, all cutie-pie smiles and icing-white teeth.

Grief is a strange bird.

Sometimes it darkens our skies;

others, it gathers in the trees

watching us move about our day,

present but not interfering.

On the worst days, it murmurates,

small hurts becoming one writhing mass

blocking out the sun, looming and shitting

on the windshield of your new car.

Darwinkle cleared his throat and announced that he loved me, had always loved me, and was ravenous for my body. I replied, "Oh," and offered him a cup of tea. He said he would, thank you, with two sugars and slice of lemon on the side. We took it on the porch, as it was sunny and almost time for the Good Humor man.

The smooth, hard lines of her flute case dig into the flesh of her thighs when she pushes

through rush hour.

Don’t be careless with your instrument, Andy. That’ s your livelihood.

A pizzicato of rain kisses her almost-smile when she climbs out of Kings Cross, a clock

encased by redbrick boasting a new time zone. Men with suits shove past, scowling at her stupor,

so she hauls her life’s belongings and herself out of the way. When she laughs, it tastes sour, and

she has to clamp her lips together to keep from puking.

Andy, you’ve never even left the country. You hate big cities. Why on earth would you go

to London without me?

he has become

his own father.

Do I care

that the two cats

in the alley

are having better sex

than I am?

Yes,

I do care.

Fight harmony

where you will –

sever closeness

with a blunt saw –

unzip unity

and give each country in turn

your very best

castration –

The light apparently

is unaware the weekend has begun,

Consider, drip coffee,

no refills, scattering

of keystrokes from an

adjoining table.

my damp, dark curls unfurl

part like curtains around your fingers

i want to find water where water has not been found.

the plates are older than either of the other relationships

at the table.

am I the hero, seeking,

tracing a path to some

dark, unknown center,

both hopeful and afraid?

I speak in metaphor

only on the page, and never

as prophecy.

all praise begins with hiding—

what happened to that book—

that one which we both loved,

desperately, one summer,

i hear guys in suits are making

fruit illegal. they go ripping out

the woman-trees at the roots, calling

sustenance “mess!” yada, yada!

it’s so rare now to find fruit

in the mess. it’s so rare to find

sweetness sticking to pavement.

i slip my hand into your pocket when we walk side

by sidewalk—only half for warmth—you say

you imagine us december, in the mountains—i say,

the awning caught a bucket of rain

for you, left a dry patch big enough

to stand and watch the streets turn

when rain becomes snow. cat curled

in bed early, left a warm spot. now

she’s waiting at the window for you

to come inside.

on the concrete, I found something with all the love left inside,

From one tiny room to another across town,

up and down oniony flights of August stairs,

I carry everything she asks me to, doing my best

to be as strong as her directing finger assumes me

to be. I’m good, I swagger when she asks if a break

is something I might need, and I wonder why I pretend.

What harm would a break do me, heaving and wheezing

as I am, despite my best efforts to hide and deceive?

         It’s admirable, how well this home is kept. Yes, you heard, bit of a celebrity. No, I’ve not watched any either, but in the office they say she was a demon with the duster.

         You’ll have noticed already with your shoes off, the depth of the carpet here, where your toes in winter will sink into the slate-diamond grey shag and keep you from remembering the rubber-soled slippers kicked deep under the bed on Thursday mornings, when you’ve heard the trundle of rubbish trucks entering the estate crunching on the not-quite-gritted tarmac and so quickly gathered the offending sacks, moving from carpet to doorstep and forcing you to maybe pad upstairs, compost bag still in hand, heavy, sodden with coffee grounds and slimy with the remnants of a bag of bistro salad, getting on your knees to tease the slippers out from under the bed, bag spending too long over that rich fur, moisture gathering at the weight of its bulge, precipitously close to dripping. Or the carpet might have you so fooled that you rush outside in the frost, abandoning all thought of shoes, so nurtured have you been by the carpet, that you slide on the strangely frictionless front garden, being as it is bricked up for extra parking, and the rough soles of your feet are too frictionless, softened by the comfort you’ve moved into.

When I lean over

and take a bite

out of the clouds

I taste the

turquoise wall

I ate when I

was four

Crumbling

in my mouth

He told me not to

which was the only

information I needed

to make the opposite decision

and let go.

It’s been obvious for weeks now, the butts piling up beneath the ficus’s leaves or underneath the bed. When I start finding them in the corners of the kitchen, I finally say something to Lauren. She sighs, says she’ll have a word with him. Asks me not to make a big deal over it. Says he only has one or two when he’s stressed.

“He’s a cat,” I say. “What can he possibly be stressed about?”

The clouds aren’t for me.

I thought, at some point, that they were, that I could carve a home out of water vapor, but I would only ever melt through. I would crash from the sky, and I would not be the pretty kind of shooting star but just the dying girl on your back porch. You’d open the door to smashed bits of tile and skin and bones, and then you’d put on that disappointed face and take me back home.

But when I was a kid, and maybe sometimes now, I used to jump as high as I could.

I smoked what was left of my pipe and tidied my house. I thought about how alone I would look if a camera was hidden. I folded a few months of laundry and spackled the drawers. I gathered the cobwebs and laid them onto a plate one strand at a time. I imagined a hammock’s day in the mild sun. I twisted the clock to display a time I preferred.

Rock-pool eyes,

kindling in my cradle.

I suspect he’s fretting

when his arms spasm

but it’s my chest he’s worrying.

Stop-motion moves –

at play or clutch –

his head dips to bone, a plate.

‘I can’t sustain you, son,

like you do me.’