If you would rather listen to a couple of poems, check out the video of a reading here.
Some new work...
Recently appeared in the wonderful The New Frontier
The Cloud People
for my mother
I once thought clouds held cloud people,
with eyes of rain, bodies of solid vapour,
some souls of the dead, the others angels
treading softly across the cloud-heather,
but in the plane, my hand down the toilet
I cried when I grasped nothing in the hole,
and after a laughing fit, you spoke quietly
pointing at precipitation out the window,
all the evaporated continents of moisture,
stratus and astrostratus and cumulonimbus,
how the droplets coalesce under pressure,
to fall as rain or drift as the fog among us,
so I know this is the only world there is,
and I jog each day to live a little longer,
but the odd day, if I go running in mist,
I stare into the faces of passing joggers,
in case I pass some shadow of your face,
out of the blue, headed some other place.
Recently Appeared in Poetry Ireland...
Blume, Blume, Blume
Crowing on my shoulders Neasa gets the words wrong,
as the frogs on her bus go frog, frog, frog, the trees go
tree, tree, tree on the overgrown top deck of her song,
taking the back road to creche between dried daffodils
and an actual bus-driver leant on his bus for a smoke,
as the layby hums with flies and the husks of roadkill,
where lockdown-addled drivers tip covid-tame rabbits
for a tanning by maggots among dandelions the yellow
of Neasa’s coat, a duckling yellow, and she surveys it,
the bus and pelts and flowers as she sings, sings, sings
her own name, what she does is her, as a rose is a rose,
at the reins of my hair, thrice-pulsing queen of spring.
.
From Pigeon Songs
Ice Bear Dreams
She is a cub again on
the long swim south
treading in the dark
wake of her mother.
Stars rain down, hissing
out in the seawater.
Unending rutting. His
claws pinch her,
so parched she jaws the
powdery drift,
and watches steam plume
from her lips.
Her footing slips at the
foot of the cliff
She tumbles skywards
past the rank nests
of kittiwakes and the
screeching auklets.
Inside
each beached whale there is a pit
where
the bodies of her long-dead cubs
live
peering between the blubbery ribs.
Her paws shrink to a
seal’s black nubs.
She breathes water and is
untouchable.
Bears lumber after her
in the blue chill.
Bawling
toothlessly she watches her kill
stripped by
foxes down to the bare bones,
but cannot
lift her paws up from the snow.
Horking beached blubber
down her throat,
she hears the whale’s
lungs. It’s soft breath
is indistinguishable
from her mother’s breath.
The ice is gone. The
males have stayed south
to sweat and brawl on
the drylands forever,
and left her to mewl
cubless on the gravel.
The moon burns the
blizzard at eyelevel,
until the snow leaves
her and the moon alone.
It’s skin is as warm as a teat against her nose.
From The Salt Harvest
Cockles
Take the orange meat into your muscled spaces.
Five years they filtered sewage on Morecambe flats,
nestled as dense as teeth against strong tidal scrapes,
counting the oilspills, until Yu Hui slapped his plank
and bore them up by griddle and craam in the early stars,
Yu Hui who ended in sand as wind blasted North off the map,
stilling the tubes of his cochleae cordis. Tear them apart,
boiled in cream and crushed with garlic on your sideplate,
alive oh, to feed the crusted bivalves of your heart.