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Here’s some of my recently published poems and flashes. Enjoy!

Waves

Because the doctor said she could do with a change of scenery, he rented a little blue fisherman’s house for them in Cornwall. Because it was out of season they got a good deal but because she’d left behind her friends and family and everything she held dear including the streets she’d walked down so briefly with her pram, she cried for days, and because she was crying so loudly that the house became unbearable, he took to walking along the seafront. Because he didn’t want to stand out too much – she’d told him once how locals had hounded D H Lawrence and his wife because Frieda wore red stockings – he began to copy the fishermen he saw, walking with his hands looped behind his back, his eyes gazing out to sea. Because it’s difficult to walk without looking where you are going, and because it was sometimes misty and the winds so raw that he wore a scarf half way up his face, he fell in the sea more than once. Luckily, because there were so many fishermen around he was quickly rescued, but because no one could understand why a grown man couldn’t keep out of the water, the rumours began that he was a drunk, or wanted to commit suicide, or perhaps he was just fed up with a crying wife. Because wouldn’t you be? Because no one else would talk to them, and because he couldn’t stop looking out to the sea, they began to spend evenings together in their little cliff top garden, her crying and him looking. Because there’s only so much time you can bear like this, one night, she turned to him and asked what he was staring at. Because he was a bit of a bore, to be honest, she expected a lecture on the density of stars or how climate change was affecting oceans and ice levels in the Arctic, or even how although grief takes people different ways so maybe it was time for her to listen to everyone and make an effort to move on, and because of this, when he simply said, ‘the horizon,’ she was touched. Because of this, she followed his gaze too thinking at first that the haze was her tears but then she saw it was fog and realised that this was how he was seeing the world too, so actually she might be seeing clearer than him, and because neither wanted to talk any more they just spent the night looking out, breaking their silence occasionally by calling out new words for it: ‘murk’, ‘vapour,’ ‘drizzle,’ ‘murk’, and because she had done English Literature at university, while he’d studied Engineering, she carried on longer than him, ‘brume,’ ‘haar’ and ‘gloaming’. Because she had forgotten the joy of playing, it took her some time to realise she’d stopped crying, and because he was a sore loser, it took him even longer, but because by then, they had both got so cold in the garden, they stayed close in bed that night. And because it was a better day the next morning, they made a sudden decision to go back to London that day. Because he was a creature of habit, he decided for one last walk, his hands looped behind his back. Because today the horizon was clear, there was nothing to interest him there so he looked around instead, saw the men nodding at him, realised the fishing was now more of a tourist attraction than real work these days and because it wasn’t the holiday season any more everyone was bored, and that actually, the sight of a man falling in the sea must have been funny. Because of this, he stopped still and shocked himself with something he realised was a laugh. And because it had been so long, for him and for her, the sound of it carried like a seagull all the way to that blue house on the cliff edge, and because, without all the crying, she had done the packing already, she came out to see what was happening. And because the gloaming, the haar, the brume, the murk had gone, she saw him, saw him waving up at her, and because her heart skipped a little bit and she'd thought it had died, she waved back.

Reading a book on lost gardens

Endlessly sunny, with trees a line of dots
like small boys' knees in an old school photo

so I read it in the same way, a fascination
in the butterfly-pinned moment.

I stroke black and white grass, pick fruit
with my finger and thumb from walled gardens,

trace the serpentine walks I’d take, my full skirt
brushing at the knots until the scent of box

releases, each path could be a wish or a regret.
Can photographs be capable of happiness?

Because as I turn the page I see an open gate
beckoning to the future, and I bend with jealousy

at how they’ll never watch each other grow old
or laugh at all that time left for flourishing.

Love and Stationery

Tonight, women dream of stationery;
well thumbed catalogues hidden
in bedside tables, falling open
at filing solutions. Some promise
this will be the last time, one final look
at industrial size staplers, hole punches.
Others take it further. Post-it notes
edge their desire as they chase private
rainbows husbands don’t understand.
At lunchtime, propelled out by a need
for highlighters, their fingers brush
sellotape dispensers as they imagine
being held by paperclips,
protected by bubblewrap,
wiped clean with Typex.
In quiet moments,
they will pull out new journals,
those blank, lined, empty pages waiting
to be filled; who knows what magic
will result from an organized life?
At bad times, when the ink runs dry,
you will find a woman standing in front
of an open stationery cupboard, the flutter
of her heart stilled by the solid weight
of correspondence quality paper.

Stalked

To be followed home by a rose, to catch the scent of it, the sound of roots scuttling like clawed feet, the way it wilts on corners, dipping itself like a bird into the puddle, how it talks, uttering every love cliché, it’s whispering after you and you’re trying not to hear it. You prefer useful plants, not this song of rosewater, rosepetal jam, and when a passerby spots it, tries to pick it for herself, it just nods its head when she jumps back, putting her fingers up to her mouth, surprised by the thorn left in her skin; even when you speed up, it is waiting for you around the next corner, another bud on its stem, a trail of curled petals like snail confetti behind, and it’s telling you now that it’ll give up everything for you, that the minute it saw you, it knew, and you want to shout not to make such a scene, but the rose is curled round your leg now, and it’s saying it can’t exist without you, if no one looks at it, calls out its name, what will it be.