Category: Writing
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Shopping centres, caves and the fate of us all
If you leave Nottingham train station and head towards the centre of the city, you will eventually come up against a large brown wall barricading the city. Actually it is the backside, or front (it’s hard to tell), of a shopping centre called Broadmarsh. Like a museum gift shop, the only way is through. I…
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Green Boots
The water falls on her head, on her face, around her ears. She sits on the floor and it falls encasing her in the only shelter she has found in this house. She feels safe, she must be, no one can demand anything from her while she´s in the shower. Her back hurts. Her feet,…
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A Wolf, Crossing
When night falls in the Charente, the inhabitants of its rural villages retreat to their homes. They lock their doors and pull iron-hinged timber shutters over every window. Pale sandstone walls, grey with age, cracked and pitted, their seams of lime mortar dried to dust, become as impenetrable as medieval keeps. In the dark, you…
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Things She Doesn’t Know
When she was growing up, Lily kept a list of things that she didn’t know. She was big on lists then – she liked knowing the top ten most valuable beanie babies, or the five most destructive earthquakes in history. She liked knowing things, and she liked not knowing things, and she wanted to keep…
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Cae’r Blaidd, or Field of the Wolf
The last wolf died in this place but the hour of the wolf remains and the wolves call for us, call for you calling haunting us with their calling calling for us over and over again It is the time when we cross over as some people say of the passing away in the…
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Charmed
She calls him from a thousand miles distance – sends forth an invisible cord from her edge of cliff to his edge of existence. She calls him in autumn storms, in summer stillness, grooves a new migration route, moons him towards her for tide after tide. Some claim, with disdain, that she practised with…
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Wolf
Snow covered the town, and murmurs. Unease, downcast eyes, a rumour you were back in the holding where the song thrush is mute, where a path spills like yarn to the clearing. The fetid black leaf and the bracken. The crackle underfoot. The weird cabin. It gaped from the white like a lunatic’s face….
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Hamrammr
Úlfhéðnar in my wolf-skin, I am smuggled beneath this fearsome hide. Sneaksome, bristlepad varúlfur, I must stay concealed, keep my woman-ness below the scenting of the men. They would smell my sex and think me weak, think me there for the mating, the taking, the ruling, the putting me in my place. Bottom of…
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Phenomenology of the Feral
After the Meat Tree I Man’s best friend, woman’s best friend are has a jay, and mere has an add. I flower mere and he follows me that was made of wood and flowers and see, it is pronounced mer as the french for sea not mere lie down you are drunk. Remember…
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The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner
– adapted from SJ Fowler If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be? Black banana, fruit flies, les ananas ne parlent pas, (a little song of two children learning french on Canadian TV). In middle school, the chair in the crypt. The stack of cryptic poems high enough to use as a…
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Gilfaethwy
The pirate is part magician and part thief. With all the gauze and white tape, I know the left side of his face better than the right side. Pirates, like werewolves, live tied to the moon. The dark break in the white plaster is the negative of the full moon rising. here Gilfaethwy gills…