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Excerpt from The Speaking Sea

White breakers send words
convey messages for miles
waves murmur blue lament.

The swell sighs
breathes meaning
exhales anticipation.” Read more!

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Excerpt from A Taste
“…you were not like anyone who’d been this close before and not at all the way I imagined, and the buzzing in my head was so loud I didn’t know why you froze. Until I heard my mum shouting hello from the hall as she laid down crinkling plastic bags of shopping. We embarked…” Read more!

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from The House at Westerly, Rhode Island
The house was the sea.
Or a ship on the sea.
Or a deer-blind
deep in the woods.
From the deck, they watch bitterns
skulk at the hem of vernal pools,
while green-heads
bomb through the dusk. Read more!

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Excerpt
I will never pull hair from a plug-hole without thinking of the ovarian cyst Celia had. It was made entirely out of hair and teeth – apparently that’s what cells find it easiest to mutate into… Read more!

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Excerpt
bare trees, a crow shape
neatly cut out of the snow
behind it, the dark

the snowflake symbols
on the weather forecast
are all identical… Read more!

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From While You Weren’t Listening
I heard the glass
say to the tabletop:
I like the way you hold me.
I heard the table
answer back:
I like the way you feel.
The barstools
thanked the floor
for all the nights it propped them up… Read more!

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Excerpt: There are plenty of great ways to introduce a story; you can start with a death, like Albert Camus, or you can start with rainfall, like Edgar Allen Poe, or a wedding, or an introduction, or an elaborate pratfall, drunk, down a set of stairs. Being original and being clever were never my strong suits – besides it should probably be with what you remember best that you start off a story. I remember the songs the best. This song is My Generation, by The Who, and… Read more!

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Excerpt: When the fires broke out, I was so high on endorphins I didn’t even notice the overwhelming stench of smoke. We had been sleeping on the roof of a warehouse, and Sean had woken me up by crawling into my sleeping bag and pushing up my shirt, his hair still smelling of the river, of oil and amphibian nightmares. But his hands were warm and insistent, and what he said was so filthy I momentarily forgot where we were.
So, yes. While the government set fire to its capital city, I was being fucked silly on top of the bonded store,… Read more!

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Excerpt: The final straw was lying in wait for them on the doormat when they came back after a fortnight’s holiday. Both of them had taken turns trying to barge the door open until James brought out the thin wooden spatula Chris had laughed at him for taking. ‘See. Told you this would come in handy.’ After a good two minutes of shoving, the wad of paper jammed in the gap between door and floor, gave and… Read more!

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Excerpt: As the plane descended through clouds, and geometric wisps of coastline opened up before us, I looked down, taking in the enormity of the bible-black sea. We lowered, and the sharp colourless rocks of the cliff edge swung into view, stabbing up from the breaking waves. When I was a child, my father told me stories of brave seamen who, having disrespected the water with boasts of their own brilliance, had been wrecked upon these very rocks and drowned only metres from the island’s shore. I believed him, in the way a child always believes his father, and even today the fear lingered in me. Looking down from the sky, I still felt my own inferiority to the waves. Read more!

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Excerpt: I then drank in relative peace, until the requisite thoughts when I’m alone in any crowded place kicked in: What the hell am I doing here? Who are these people? Look at that guy – he looks like a dick. Wandering around the room, stirring around these unanswerable questions, and arguing with myself – maybe he just LOOKS like a dick – brings me back round, and the two girls both look at me and laugh – this time I’m certainly being fucked with – when I realize they’re right in front of me… Read more!

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Excerpt: from Ghazal Jigsaw

From the small, closed window of our study table the stars are set
like the pieces of your space jigsaw. I ask if you’re any closer. The stars are set

you mutter as you slot another nook into the realised corner, and yet
you seem unsure which cosmos you’ve just pieced together. The stars are set

upon like foxes: your hands are hungry dogs. Your eyes are ready trumpets…Read more!

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Excerpt: dandelion, dan’di-li-en, n. a common yellow-flowered composite (Taraxacum officinale) with jagged-toothed leaves. [Fr. dent de lion, liontooth]

It was the first word she’d looked up in the dictionary and the first flower she’d ever picked. How the white whiskers that floated softly through the wind were anything like lions’ teeth she did not know. As she lay on the ground to reach the mass of white flowers that strained upwards to break free from the edge of the towering cliff, she had leaned in for the kill and blown them completely bare. All except one… Read more!

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Excerpt: from Train to London

I give you birchwood. I give you
the white flowers of hawthorn.
I give you witchhazel and alder
with sunlight strobing through their branches.
You give me the fuzz-yellow buzzcut fields,
heather like coral, gaps in stone walls, a scarecrow,
faces of cliffs like ellipses, the sea,
the sea… Read more!

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Excerpt: Suddenly you realize that if you could dare to hold eye contact, you could begin anything. There are entire subways packed with people with whom that is all it would take; catch their eye and hold it tight in your fists, keep it. Once you have it they will follow you anywhere, perhaps, leap headfirst into clouds that smell of burnt hair and insanity, that curdle like plastic in flames. Can you feel the incredible surge of opportunities, multiplying ferocious and exponential like amoebas? Read more!

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Excerpt: from Sliced

1/
Amy Winehouse sits on a patio in Camden Town. She is drinking. Amy Winehouse is in love again

2/
In the recording studio, the sound man sheds a tear. This woman can sing. She also has fresh scabs up and down her left arm… Read more!

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Excerpt: Annika absentmindedly inspects the tear in the center of the cushion. She trails her fingernails down it, feeling, abstractly, as though the vinyl is skin, and the sponge inside guts, when she notices a crumpled piece of paper wedged down the side of the booth. She pries it out. It resembles a white carnation before she smooths the page against the tabletop… Read more!

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Excerpt: Arch couldn’t rest. There was a wolf on the mountain that took his grouse and killed his deer and sometimes came down murderously amongst his farmer’s sheep. It was not a real wolf but an animal descended from the dogs he’d turned out to die or go feral, so it was no mystery why it knew and despised him especially… Read more!

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