The Last Voyage   They came at us with rocks and spears, the oldest of our soldiers falling with his head split open, blood as red as his coat, while muskets rattled from the long boat. The captain turned his back on the attackers, shouting, perhaps, to stop the shooting. So they stabbed him from […]

Read More

A Single Sparrow The present life of man, O king, seems to me like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I […]

Read More

On the Composition of Haiku   i The haiku master— labouring past the moment to seize the moment.   ii Counting syllables— the ancient haijin did not count it beneath them.   iii Attempting to touch in seventeen syllables a small thing as such.   Andrew Lansdown         Ukiyo-e Kawaii   Plainly […]

Read More

Sense of Out-of-Place Barbecue. Unincorporated community in North Carolina. Bastardstown. Townland in Wexford, Ireland (Irish name: Baile Bhastaird). Batman. City, in Turkey, threatened to sue Warner Bros for use of name. Bitch Mountain. Summit in Essex County, New York. Boring, Oregon. Sister city to Dull, Scotland, and Bland, NSW. Boquete. Small town in Panama. (Boquete […]

Read More

Peacocks When the rain came that afternoon, I put on the Emperor. At first I thought it was the peacock strutting on the roof scrabbling around, but no, the downpour was flooding the damp ground. I had seen them earlier, the peacocks, head to head, cock to hen in what appeared to be avian affection. […]

Read More

The Whale Watcher’s Road, Moreton Bay The Humpbacks have a way of knowing beyond our ken, their biomagnetic cortex tuned to an inner codex each new season, one where songs of their ancestors pull aside the curtain of time as they cruise the Whales’ Road northward, up from the Antarctic to Moreton Bay to leave […]

Read More

Serpentarium She can fit a thirty-foot giant into one sheet of A4,   pack pythons into her sketchbook,   squeezing their loops in tight breeding-balls, until   the man comes with his forked stick and pins her head down.   She must have been drawing too fast, her tail in her mouth   like Ouroboros—that’s […]

Read More

Lineage You’ve heard it said, or seen it inferred, we never lose our parents and only ever find parts of them. The bits they didn’t hide, the bits they couldn’t piece together, the bits and pieces that make up a big part of you, the chips off their blocks along with irksome blockages to go […]

Read More

Epic Lunar Perigee The skin of Earth itches, twitches, wrinkles as tectonic plates move. Volcanic acne spew lava, smoke, move people far away to safety.   Up north, snow-bound, derailed, people hibernate. Down south, sapped of all energy, with threat of fire and flood, we estivate, craving relief.   Tides are very high and low, […]

Read More

Going for a Burton I hear you sighing through the curtain. I see you singing on the stair. I know most nights I’m in your sights. I feel it when I douse the lights. I feel it everywhere. Now here, now there, without a care, Your silver skin, your golden hair, So young, so yare, […]

Read More