I get lost in the soft tips of the cedar tree
hanging over the fence
My parents melt into deckchairs
like American cheese
essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
I get lost in the soft tips of the cedar tree
hanging over the fence
My parents melt into deckchairs
like American cheese
If you walk along a path
between forest and shore
between grains eroded by the sea
they were mountains once
(coffee, pastry,
food-words,
unfettered time)
Words words words black as a cat.
I just saw you in the periphery of
Manet’s Olympia — or maybe Cézanne’s
…across the bitter world, a sweet gift from Pachamama
like my father who taught me to feel
and press its skin: a map of lost worlds
They do not know that the sun terrifies me.
I often fantasise about tipping the cabinet forward until the plastic drawers slide out and spill their contents in a wave of plastic. I tell myself they should be recycled or reused. But in the fantasy it all just spills out and keeps on spilling.
“We can’t take it all,” her brother had said, tossing memories in a bin bag like kittens for drowning.
That cow can’t walk. She’s all lame. I won’t touch her hooves.
I stood under the alligator juniper that shaded my tent in the oak woods. Effie squatted between my feet. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade called his receptionist Effie. But the Effie at my feet was no lady. I called her F. E. Cottontail in my journals. Cottontails are coprophagous – literally, Fecal Eating. That…
A version of this piece first appeared on Trampset In April, the reality of the pandemic fades into the background as my family deals with our own internal crisis. The house is in Kemsing, a southern English village in the Kent countryside. It is nestled on the slopes of the North Downs, a range of…
We are bound to nature, worms and dirt, we come from earth, and to earth we will return.