The Source
Matchstick Cats
Mark and Trev were surrounded on the bed of the truck by old wooden beams and bits of furniture – debris of a life that wasn’t theirs – and...
Ode to a Nearly Beloved
"As though through tracing paper, I etch your features onto faces of strangers I’ll never know."
Pink Tulips
"I want our story to be one of fields of flowers and quiet sunsets. I
do not wish for violence."
Tangerine
"Picking apart the peel of the ripest fruit, prying open its flesh."
Verbalisation
"Then there is a sudden pull – my loose thoughts spill over the pebbly surface of the page. Images crashing and breaking against sobering stillness, propelling seafoam into the air, rumpling the Edenic crispness of the page."
Paying Attention
"I wrote that the world feels too much of everything,
that I am so lucky to be in it."
Time spent in Oxford
"The photographs on the walls show people years ago in the same spot.
Did they feel the same, love the same, breathe the same.
It seems impossible that they did, even more so that they did not."
Ode to the Sunflowers my Dad bought for me
"You –
yellow in 5 Acts,
yellow in division to make up a whole
– belong to the morning"
Freshers’ Flu – Why My Mum Invented COVID
"Two cultures, both alike in dignity
In times of (un)fair Corona, where we lay our scene
From ancient tradition one plans to be set free
where alcohol makes the liver unclean
From forth the fatal minds of these two foes
Parents worry they'll lose the apple of their eye;
with misadventures and revealing clothes
Do with Fresher's Week her dignity will die."
Four Children
"And I sat with my back to the skies
as I mouthed out a prayer to the winds
and imagined them ghosts; for where I sat, half-anaesthetised,
four children had used to sit"
Essay Crisis
People often say that progress,
is not always linear.
and p r o g r e s s,
sometimes doesn't always look like 2,000 words* (including citations) on a Microsoft Word document"
My Dog and Its Owner
"My dog had lost its collar in a cave,
Whereto, through chasing night, astray it ran
After my whistle panicked in its ears."
The Sword-Cross
"A warrior of Palestine
Traversed with a Cross for sword,
From Babylon to Jerusalem,
Until he spoke not word."
Veraneio
"Raised in the endless, relentless summer of tropical living, snapshots of summer swamp my memories of childhood – beachside days, aching sunburns, blond locks tainted unflatteringly green by chlorinated pools."
On my white window ledge
'Now I see them yield to the light, papery and, with old age, translucent.'
Ode to an empty Oxford
"The quads no longer echo with passing, light-hearted exchanges or 3am stumbling returns from Hassan's."
The Sick Worm
Thy earthy tendrils long to prick
The burgeoning bud.
KitKat
Lying down like an upset wine bottle,
smeared across the floor
