Look what this poem is doing to me.
One hand at my throat, and pushed up this close
it's lusty, musky, and temptingly male.
But when push came to shove, it said, 'Turn out
your pockets, pompous poet, of lazy
rhetorical devices, give me tales
or fine phrases to daze and amaze me.'

So I tried.

But the poem looked askance at my crazy
collection: at Tam's funny flat hat, and
Ozzy's lorn legs. And the twenty brown bees
couriered poste-haste from Persephone?
They fared no better. I rooted around,
and brought from a sack, seven apple pips.
'Just look at these,' I said, sure to impress.

'They'll get stuck in my teeth!' it sniffed, then
bloody hells bells, the bastard poem bit me.
'Poem, oh poem, please don't reject me
really, I promise to be good as a
good poet should, and not to annoy you.
I love to tease but I love even more,
poem, to please, don't you see? Say you do.'

The poem sighed.

'If you promise to be good, as a
good poet should and not to annoy me
then I shall demur.' And the poem looked quite
coy and we sat there, poet, poem, swinging
our several feet to a silent, shared beat.
Between us the beating of our shy hearts.
It was not yet love, but it was a start.

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as she rolls me with soft knuckles
and holds all my longing bones there.
My head lolls, cupped with two, three hands

that pull me falling forwards, where
slightly fingers tighten in my hair.
and hold me as she starts to sing.

[an earlier version of the poem]
the music is No es tan cierto by Juana Molina.

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I can see the shed outside, covered in a creeper and crusted on top with snow. In the summer, when the creeper is in leaf, it blends into the hedge behind. There's something Tolkien about it. I fully expect it to talk to me one of these days. And when it does, I'll say hello back, and with some emphasis on empathy and understanding, I'll add, 'I see you're stuck too.'

I couldn't really imagine the tone of it's voice, but it may say something like,

'Cut this fucking creeper off me when you next get your sorry arse out of bed.'

And I'd have to retort, 'Shed, anyone can see that the creeper is holding you up. If I cut it down, you'll fall to the ground.'

Silence possibly from the shed. Then, in an altogether more contrite tone, 'But I'm choking'

I, as you might expect, would need to give my next response some thought,

'Ah, but only slowly, shed. Besides, better that than a pile of sticks.'

'Sticks might not be so bad' the shed might say, changing tack.

'Give me the attention of dynamite. Polarise or disassemble me. But do not let me choke'

'Shed, shed, shed, shed, shed' I'd say, 'If I cut the creeper and you went away touting for the attention of the avant-garde, then where would I keep my pots and things; the fork, the spade and the pea-netting? Would it help if I wrote the names of all my former boyfriends inside you, or covered you with embroidery?'

But that could well provoke the shed into some furious rage, and might face me with a barrage of abuse on my needlework and handicraft skills. And I'd have to pull the pillow over my head just to get some peace.

Maybe best just to sit here instead, and not engage my shed in conversation after all.

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Lately, she'd started to notice smells: chips, grass, beef, vinegar; smells from shopping bags; dog smells; and a smell so strong from her childhood that she could taste it: Caramac chocolate. She could even feel the thin slip of the gold foil paper between her fingers.

Then the smells started to get complicated: salty roses; washing powder and jam; stewed apples and petrol. She didn't get it, it made no sense. Where could the smells be coming from?

One day, she brought her warm, downy arm up to her nose and breathed in, slowly. Skin, of course. She inhaled again: a faint smell of peach shower gel, and then something else. What? She screwed up her face in disgust: pigeons, she smelled of pigeons. Dry, dusty, filthy, light-starved, shitting pigeons...

Still gripping her arm, she saw herself as a child of six or seven following her Grandfather through the rank, dim, slatted shadows of his pigeon coup; him cooing and rattling dessicated corn around the edge of an enameled tin dish. She'd been fascinated but repulsed by the birds that'd looked at her sideways and whose white shit had stuck to the soles of her shoes. Then in the shadows, her unsmiling Grandfather had squeezed her flat chest and she'd let fall the handful of corn she'd been holding tightly in her small hand. She remembered his filthy fingernails and the startled, confined pigeons flapping violently, filling the air with choking dust. She rubbed her skin furiously: it flared red like a pigeon's eye.

She went to the doctor. He looked at her in a kindly, mildly alarmed way as she told him, more hurriedly than she'd intended to, that she smelled stuff; that she could smell pigeons on her. She knew that he'd not be able to help, but when he paused and told her that he could smell nothing passing her a questionnaire to fill in on depression, she'd looked back at him blankly and retorted: 'I'm not depressed'. She'd left then smelling, she was convinced, like a full, heavy raw liver, sliced in two.

One day she smelled of white rum and was eighteen again in Paris wearing a white cotton dress with broderie anglais layered to the hem at her knee and then up in a tight bodice to her neck. It was very, very pretty, she'd thought. But then, jammed in the Metro sometime later, she found herself with her back to some bloke, who spent the journey with his fist rammed hard against and between her buttocks, knowing that she couldn't move. That evening she'd got drunk on white rum and lemon juice and drank until she was sick. She never wore the dress again.

The smells got worse. People started to notice, she was sure of it. Young women, mainly, with perfect, peachy skin, their nostrils flaring. One day she'd smell like some old, dry potato with frantic white shoots trying to grow out of a fetid, plastic bag; the next the dried up smell of baby milk vomited up. She hated herself, and chaffed at her skin.

She wanted to smell clean, perfumed, somewhere between sandalwood and vanilla not bleach and blood. She tried a variety of costly dermo-facial creams with gently abrading micro-beads. Hopeless. Though she baulked at the cost, a skin peel that slathered her in trichloroacetic acid delivered on the promise to separate and peel away top layers of skin to leave her face 'regenerated' and 'thoroughly cleansed'. She glowed. But her skin was defiant, and that evening as she splashed cold water on her tender face she could smell fish where the water ran back through her cupped fingers.

Finally, she bought a pumice stone and scrubbed, needing to get right under her skin. She scrubbed and scrubbed until she bled, red raw shining patches flaring across her body. But still she scrubbed.

It couldn't go on. She woke one day in great pain in a hospital bed, swaddled in bandages, her abraded, flayed skin raw and sticky beneath the warm dressings. She felt strangely secure, and closed her eyes; was it a dream, or could she smell the faintest perfume of petrol-free, damask roses? Perhaps this was the last smell she smelled as she lay there alone as the sores on her festered and spread. A little more than two weeks later her exhausted body quite simply gave up.

When the porters came to remove her they found her in a small, stuffy annex at the end of the ward.

'Jeez, it stinks in here. What's that smell?' said one.

The other went to the window and flung it wide open, inhaling the fresh air deeply.

'Nothing but bad skin, mate,' he said, 'Nothing but bad skin. Believe me, you get used to it.'

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This morning I found a fish under the fridge. A flat fish of some sort. Had to be, there was never room for a salmon or a cod under there. That I found it at all was remarkable. It was only because I was down on my hands and knees, head pressed flat on the floor looking for the silver hook fastening from off the end of a necklace that I saw it at all.

Unmistakable. Two silver eyes peering out of the gloom. Blinking now and then. I blinked back.

Now, both you know and I know that I can't stand fish. But what could I do? Leave it there? I stretched out on my stomach, feeling the threadbare grain of the carpet cool and scratchy against my cheek. The fridge door towered above me like the rusting hull of an old, white steel trawler.

'Hello, buddy,' I said, 'What you doing under there?'

The fish blinked again. Good start, I thought. I reached out an arm, stretching out my hand tentatively towards the fish. It recoiled sharply, moving back with a damp thwack against the skirting board behind the fridge. I strained to see it in the gloom, and withdrew my hand. Christ, the carpet stank. I sat up, rubbing off a crust of fluff and old food off my cheek.

Now what? It couldn't stay there, under the fridge. I lay down again, but, try as I might, the fish wasn't for coming out. It seemed otherwise okay. All the same, I had no idea how long it'd been there under my fridge, and was worried that it might be hungry or thirsty. I wondered what I could give it to eat. Bread? Bacon? Worms?

Over the next few hours the fish rejected all my attempts to feed it, and my offerings of broken up biscuits, cornflakes and crackers went unheeded and looked like so much stale flotsam washed up under the fridge. I was losing patience with this fish, I tell you. It was beginning to smell too.

And then, quite by chance, I caught sight of the small hook from off the end of the necklace: the fastening that I'd been looking for when I first spied the fish. That was it! It was a bit small, but it might just work. I tied a length of string to the hook, and, in a flash of inspiration, wound a small sliver of tin foil above the hook. Perfect!

Flat on my stomach again, I carefully pushed the hook under the fridge door, and wiggled the string a little. Nothing. I wiggled it again, seeing the silver lure turn over and catch the light, and, quick as a flash, the fish shot forwards and swallowed the hook, and started to pull and thrash backwards and sideways, frantic with fear.

Jeez, for a small fish, that's a strong bugger, I thought, as the fish flailed, curling and uncurling furiously. And then it pulled sharply. My hand was wrenched suddenly under the fridge. I swore and pulled back. The fish pulled sharply again, and now my arm was stuck all the way up to the shoulder under the fridge and my cheek pressed hard against the white steel door. Little bugger! Angry now, I didn't think to let go, but yanked the line as hard as I could.

The line went slack. I relaxed. And then, with an almighty pull, the fish hauled back on the line, and the fridge started to topple over.

And I found myself nose to nose with the fish. I blinked. It blinked.

It spat out the hook.

'Dinner time, I think', it said, baring two rows of very sharp, white teeth. And I would have scarpered there and then, but, you know what? I was stuck under the fridge.

For A.W. and the fish under his fridge

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this story contains adult language and is not for children

Cara pushed her mid-length fair hair behind her ears as she bent forwards. Her head throbbed. She closed her eyes and felt the start of tears.

She was surrounded by dirty washing, which she had sorted in two piles: whites, colours. Sheets. Handkerchiefs. Rolled up knickers and socks, a child's inside-out trousers; clothes taken off in a hurry: dried-up, stained, creased. All there for her to wash.

She wondered what he thought of as he watched. If he thought of her. If he thought of her with him. Where his thoughts took him and whether he took her with him then.

She doubted it.

She felt unlovely.

Who was this woman? She looked young, unremarkable with the strange and peculiar beauty of a porn actress. Did she dress again quickly after she'd wiped the semen from her skin? Put cream on where her skin burned, or carry that feeling with her for the day? Who washed her discarded, stained clothes? Her mother? Her father, perhaps? Who was watching? Did she like the idea of all those eyes taking her in? Maybe she felt good. Maybe the sex was good. Maybe not.

But when Cara looked into this woman's eyes, she could not tell. She saw only herself in the shadows. She longed for that attention. For her buttocks to be held so that she could feel each finger and the long pulling need there. She watched, one hand between her legs, masturbating slowly. Without reluctance, she moved her legs apart, arching her back; her eyes closed. She opened her mouth slightly and let a long, tense moan come from deep within her clenched body, feeling it rise and flood though her.

And once her orgasm had passed, she felt herself less. She shut her eyes to close out the unlovely world.

And, alone, Cara washed the clothes clean.

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lips puckered up tight

like a running stitch gathered in or

like blousy curtains held in tidy pleats

in whose undisturbed folds

dust gathers and pattern creases.

a tidy kiss;

a kiss that will not affront

the neighbours

or me

or taste

of anything

except dust

maybe.

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Her death, when she saw it coming, was not unexpected, but it was not the death she would have chosen given the chance.

And she had given it thought. She'd thought about perhaps dying a frail, wan death in a sturdy bed with crisp, cotton sheets folded just so under her hands, which would be resting cooly one on the other in gentle repose on her lap. She'd be surrounded by the the grown up children she didn't have, and needed to hurry up having if this was to be a viable option. There would be pale sunshine warming her clear, freckled skin, and the sound of outside drifting in and out gently as her breath slipped away and the clock ticked on.

Or, maybe, she'd die laughing one night out with the girls, and they'd be laughing too until she dropped her bacardi and coke and they realised she'd really stopped. That'd almost be funny.

Or, maybe, she'd fall asleep and never wake from dreams that took her to the centre of herself where her being would simply dissolve into the tiniest of particles drifting from her on her last breath into the furthest reaches of the universe. It seemed improbably, zen, but she liked this death best.

She'd thought about it.

So, what was happening to her? Finding herself suddenly airborne, arse over tit, and turning and falling and the central reservation converging on her, and cars around her in collision. This was not the death she wanted, she thought, as the airbag exploded, knocking her breath from her; and then she thought no more.

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you are
gorgeous
to me
you are

i could
gorge
myself
i could

swallow you
whole
swallow you
wholely

and not
a whit
and not
a bit

i'd waste
no morsel
no freckle
no drip

i'd taste
nor suck
nor sip
nor grip

nor fuck
anyone
else
than you.

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What would you do if you found out that the man upstairs was in love with you for no other reason than what he'd heard about you?

You'd think, mad bugger, wouldn't you? I mean, how could someone be in love like that? Based just on what they'd heard? It don't feel right, does it?

When Mrs Dyer, the daft old bat from 72, told me putting her hand on my arm as she did, her dull black, tremulous eyes looking at me all concerned, I just laughed and shrugged her off, I mean, I'd never given him a thought before. But, when Sally Bishop said so too, that was not so easy to shrug off. She'd given me this funny look, widening her eyes, like she expected better (though who of wasn't clear). And, even though I'd laughed in just the same way as I'd done with Mrs Dyer, I'd felt none too good, and had to sit down when I'd got back in again.

I mean, it's not like we've ever met. He lives right above me and I'm right under him. And now, when I'm in bed staring up at the ceiling, I can almost feel his weight on me and I have to roll over and draw the covers tight around me, making sure I'm all tucked up. And then I'm wondering what he thinks when he's in bed, and hope he's not thinking about me or whether my bed's right underneath his.

All I know about him is what my neighbours tell me, and all that he knows about me is what his neighbours tell him, and his neighbours are on his floor and and my neighbours are on my floor, and somehow, somewhere between floors where the dust gathers on the stairs there's talk about us. I'm told he's about thirty, serious, keeps himself to himself. No family. Works nights. Christ-knows what they tell him about me...

For goodness sake! I've never met him! From what I'm told he drives a van around Essex, and me? Well, I'm here most of the time, apart from the time I need to go out, get food, beer, my allowance, go to the doc's. So, y'know I'm in and out. But the routine I've got going now means I never bump into him. I'm making sure of that. But I can't quite get rid of of the feeling that he might be watching me when I'm out. But then I think, don't be fookin' stupid, woman, how can he know who to watch for if he's never met you!

All the same, I listen out for him: he leaves just after six each evening, and I'm always back by then. I hear him lock his door, and then it goes quiet as he walks along the landing and I can hear him coming down the stairs. He's never in a hurry, always has this steady, measured step, step, step, step down the stairs; then past my door and down the next flight of stairs, his footsteps getting quieter and quieter until I can't hear him no more. For the last couple of weeks though, he's paused as he gets to my door. I have to put my ear to my front door and really listen, and, I can't be sure if it's right outside my door he stops, but he definitely waits somewhere out there. And it's only after, when I can't hear his footsteps anymore, that I realise I've been holding my breath. Daft, I know. Then I laugh....

Then, last week, I heard that he was off work and I hardly went out that week at all. Christ, what a week that was. The milk went bad in the fridge and I ran outta bread, and I had to put up with the smell of the kitchen bin sweating its contents. It was so bad it made me heave. And I'd hear him coming down the stairs mid-morning, mid-afternoon, times when he'd have normally been in bed and I'd be off out. And then him waiting on the landing outside my door. Once he came down late-on, it must've been late cos' I was about ready to go to bed and I heard him come down the stairs, then wait and wait, and then go back upstairs again, closing his door, and I wanted to stomp up those stairs and bang on his door and ask what the hell he was up to...but my mouth was dry, and it felt just like it does when I'm dreaming that I'm shouting but just this thin, suffocated, strained voice comes out instead.

And how can I ask what he's up to stopping outside my door and that? - he'd know then that I'd been listening on him, and I don't want him to know that. And I don't want to have to look at him. To have to look him in the eye and have him look right back at me, and see me. I don't want that at all.

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a breath of wind tumbles in through an open window and blows across his chest, running gently along his shoulder and sweeping up his cheekbone, then brushing in the faintest caress across his forehead.

he stirs briefly, arching his neck.

the wind kisses across his brow and spills around the edge of his face, pooling coolly in his warm ear. it whispers:

my man...

i carry with me the scent of bruised, bitten apricots, roasted cardamom and nutmeg kicked up in the dust by the jeweled feet of a hundred dancing children...

i carry with me dawn smoke in which is wrapped the murmuring of an old man, senseless with the memory of the apricot down of his young wife's skin;

i carry with me the furtive cries of two lovers, in whose tangled limbs i found scant shelter and where i rested, cooling, until their sweat had dried and their kicking feet sent me tumbling in a storm out of bed...

then the wind breathed harder, a dry, brittle rasp in his ear:

my man....

i could lift this cotton sheet from your sleeping body and let it fall as your last breath in a cold shroud upon you.

i could take you, and you would not know.

and the man, dreaming, was looking at himself walking naked through a deserted market, the sun hot, prickling his back; and a warm breeze wrapping and curling around him and pulling him gently, gently, gently away.

you would not know, said the wind, you would not know....

for suzee

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where the sky is lost

and the cliffs sheer high
where the wind hurls in
stones
some clatter or
flatten grass or
moss

there pressing
flapping
there's a
lee where
rust blisters
and lichens spread
breathless
liver spots
on rotting wood

there
is where
seagulls
die

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to feel it

uncurling and pushing in her ears

look

there it is stretching in a span across her brow

rolling in knuckles down her nose

and

brushing along her cheekbones

cupping her head with two, three hands

it is pushing her falling forward slowly

rocking

tapping

there are slightly fingers tightening through her hair and pulling against her scalp

gently

plucking

and

then

[this]

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picture-postcard-perfect-salads

in round white pottery dishes with a half a peach half a shiny shiny peach and white cottage cheese and i'd feel against my ankles sometimes fresh-air let in through the back from a door held open by boxes of sour lettuce stacked up haphazardly and the smell of pancakes and icecream and pancakes and syrup and pancakes and tinned fruit and i knew then that this couldn't be anything more than what it was but when i carried great towers of plates as many as i could in one go through into the restaurant the lights were bright it was dizzying like walking onto a stage

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and the dream said to me:

you should be so lucky.

and then, i admit, in an act of sheer desperation, i cried and fell wailing to the floor.

i pleaded with and beseeched the dream; and i begged and implored.

i was at once and the same time a sorrowful, disconsolate and abject supplicant.

but to no avail:

the dream was utterly unmoved by me.

and continued to sip jasmine tea from a bone-china cup.

which, if you held it up in the brightest light, would show that light dimly coming through.

and this apparent, even with tears in your eyes.

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she clicks next. leans forward slightly to scrutinise the screen. then she pushes her chair back, aware of the heels of her boots resting on the floor, and her legs, straight, warm against each other.

four more and she’s at the end of the list.

nothing beyond that.

how many times has she done this already this morning? three, four, five times? she refreshes the screen again and sees nothing more than what she expected to see. she feels here and somewhere else.

and there's this dull sense of herself.

and the frantic flapping and screaming of birds stuffed in cages.

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I do not like you.
I have no respect for you.
I would put myself first should we find ourselves on some train derailing; I would trample you.

Instead she said, again, Do you agree with what I’ve said? Do you?

and i looked at her and i said after some time:

i cannot say.

and i dropped my gaze. hearing gravel thrown up.

Aware still of her silent, stifling, scornful scrutiny. And, in the stillness, birdsong outside.

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i stood at the window and looked out at great, grey, saturated vertical struts of concrete that hold the building and declare it some gothic vision that is too close to see.

see, you need to be outside and at a distance. and not, as me, working in such desperately close proximity, barely twenty feet away from the window opposite. so close i can almost feel the building breathing back damply against my cheek.

and the windows steam up as i wait for it to stop raining.

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in the supermarket.

in amongst the tins and things and the cheap, thin clothes dashed up by thin kids working somewhere tawdry; somewherewhere: that's as good a place as any to begin. ten-a-penny factories with thin, tin roofs, and the kind of clattering din that can shatter a child's eardrums.

so no revelatory moment; no sudden realisation then. just something that falls and settles quietly; like the feeling of cotton falling on your skin.

look. i mean, really look.

what is it about these places? do you feel yourself to be more or less here?

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