In The Poetry

Corpse

This is my body, me, splayed
on the road’s crown like a shot bird.

Back street. No cars. Men step
over me, dogs and crows investigate.

My eyes gape. Circuitry of soul
is broken. I am in an odd shape

- twisted star – a pose I could never
strike in life. Gymnastic, almost.

This double-jointedness in death
soon tightens as the muscles lock.

My [...]

Pelt

I found the world’s pelt
nailed to the picture-rail
of a box-room in a cheap hotel.

So that’s why rivers dry to scabs,
that’s why the grass weeps every dawn,
that’s why the wind feels raw:

the earth’s an open wound,
and here, its skin hangs
like a trophy, atrophied beyond all

taxidermy, shrunk into a hearth rug.
Who fleeced it?
No record in the guest-book.

No-one [...]

The Lung Wash

The first day, you cough up only water,
warm saline laced with vitamins and herbs.
Your lungs mistake healing for drowning,
they fetch up what tastes like the sea
into a white enamel bowl.
Your lungs mistake baptism for torture,
‘O God. O my God. O God’.
You sought him out, like countless others
who speak too much and breathe too [...]

Jairus

So, God takes your child by the hand
and pulls her from her deathbed.
He says: ‘Feed her, she is ravenous.’

You give her fruits with thick hides
- pomegranate, cantaloupe -
food with weight, to keep her here.

You hope that if she eats enough
the light and dust and love
which weave the matrix of her body

will not fray, nor wear [...]