From Poetry London
I carry twins in me
like dogs’ heads in a handbag.
They look like father and mother.
I have carried them as long as my memory.
Don’t let us stay where we start.
Don’t bury us where we are born.
From Index On Censorship 40th Anniversary Poetry Competition - Winning Entry
A girl of fourteen fires unseen bullets from her mouth
each time she opens it; at fifteen, they flare from
her fingers as she forms letters, with a stick in the dirt,
with a pencil, taking aim over a keyboard,
striking terror with each key.
I. W.A.N.T. T.O. L.E.A.R.N.
What Devil, what God, puts brains in a girl?
Minute, yet toxic, like radioactive particles,
a crack team's challenge inside a growing frame,
to be isolated, eradicated, before a woman's shape
makes them impossible to locate inside
all that emerging flesh.
Oh, it is vital work, viral, one bullet in the right
soft tissue blasts shut a thousand mouths,
myriad minds. One girl, one gun, one message.
I. W.A.N.T. T.O. L.I.V.E. Never mind
how you spell it. You won't learn to write it.
Bite down on your bulets. Slam shut the door
to the mind you might want opened
instead of blown apart.
From National Poetry Competition - Commended Entry
My brother is pretending to be in Vietnam.
He emails at Christmas from the basement,
how he loves Hanoi.
The Tiger beer, just fifty cents, funky kids
in fake Nike, riding fast on scooters
through narrow laneways of noodles or
gravestones, or Chinese lanterns. Pho kitchens
on footpaths, women carrying baskets
of bread and mangoes. Cyclos.
Boat rides through rice paddies
where people harvest stones.
An elephant in the back of a truck.
My brother does not want
to come home.
He emails us hourly,
leaves his mark@missing.com
He hopes a travelling mind will lift him
out from under our influence,
the wave of the New Year buoy him
to higher ground. We pretend
we can't hear him padding around
beneath our daily lives. Boiling
the kettle. Using the bathroom.
The weight of our house is great.
He cannot climb, one foot
in front of the other, up
the all-too-concrete
subterranean steps.
I miss him.
Vietnam moves
at a strange and noisy pace,
that feels somehow normal.
"Mr Happy" travel agents.
The Temple of Literature. Women
carrying baskets. Elephants. Bananas.
Kitchens balanced on poles.
From Poetry London
In the unfamiliar bedroom
she starts to lift his t-shirt.
He halts her, holding her wrists
lightly.
“There’s a scary bit,” he giggles,
“I’ve got a scary bit.”
Puzzling, she peels his clothes
to find the strange canine
on the human silk of him.
One greyblack shoulder
deep in fur.
An accident when he was small,
he says. A burn that scarred.
Later the coarse hair grew
there and nowhere else.
He’d tried to shave it away,
but it resisted, thick and bristling.
She recognises the animal
emergent from the burn,
protection for the scar.
Grown from wild pain
her own terrible pet
sleeps on his skin.
She kisses it, craving
his story body, the wolf
he wears to guard her
but she doesn’t know him.
From Poetry London
The wolfing of the hungry girl, her guzzling
is carnivorous. She seeks herbs to kill the appetite,
nightprowling wild fields of rosemary,
swallowing sage to sate the muzzled animal.
She gnaws at bark to stem her flowering need for gristle,
mauls lamb’s lettuce, St John’s wort, camomile,
but grazing never blunts a hunter’s teeth.
Where medicine and ache scrap in her belly,
her bile is greening, sickening for the flesh
of one man’s body, succulent, restorative.
She wants him in her jaws, wants him inside her.
She must devour her man, then feel his loss,
still licking at her teeth. He will not linger.
He will not fill her up for very long.