Recently published poems
Birth day
Her hair catches fire. Curls fry to copper wire
when she blows a feeble spit-filled wish
over five candles. That’s when it begins.
He follows her inside the sweet shop while
she buys sugar mice. He seems nice, notices
the burnt tresses. It's her first time
alone outside home. She plays grownup though
her mother watches from the window, not ready
to cut apron strings. He’s still there later, parked
outside in a van: predatory waiter. The policeman
brings bewildering conversations about strangers
she can't reconcile with respecting elders. She’s done
wrong, it seems, because it changes everything.
Her hair is scissored into a shiny pageboy trim.
Paul Bailey draws diagrams on the school desk
of how babies are made. It sounds like poppycock.
On the way to school, something in the bushes.
Rustlings, sharp intake of breath, flash of pale flesh.
She thinks at first he must be in some distress, before
the rude sting of understanding. Years pass. She takes
matters into her own hands: red streaks, punk-dyed.
The next jeans-down clown freak taps with flashlight
on the glass window pane at midnight. She screams
alone in the all-female, off-campus student halls.
A magnet for this sort of thing, unfortunately.
The fed sighs. Such a fuss. He was only outside looking
in, after all. No harm done. All sorts of cuts after that.
Loose waves, bleach-blonde, cropped, bobbed, shaved.
It doesn’t matter. She still loses count of the violating.
Look, don’t touch, she wills her hair to say.
Grey-haired, she trades her plaits for venomous asps.
She makes a wish. Nothing has been extinguished.
Now girl turned crone can spit, burn, turn them to stone.
Birth day was Highly Commended in the Frosted Fire FIFTH Annual Single-poem competition, November 2024
Imposter syndrome
The day the birds came to my birdtable
pecking at seed an arm’s length away
like, oh I don’t know, St Francis of Assisi.
The day I stood in front of a class
as a qualified teacher in her first job
like Marie Stubbs.
The day I threw my battered saxophone case
behind the driver’s seat of my roof-down Spitfire
like YolanDa Brown.
The day I drove the camper van away,
white smoke trails whispering messages of adventure
like Aloha Wanderwell.
The day I wrote ‘author’ in a shaky hand
as I signed in at a publishing house in London
like Aphra Behn.
The day I held my baby girl
awkwardly in my arms
like a mother.
Imposter Syndrome was longlisted in the Cerasus pamphlet competition and published in Issue #3 of Cerasus Magazine, published October 2024. It was also commended in the Slipstream 2024 poetry competition.
Six portrait heads in clay
In the sculpture class, we play Prometheus,
forming human heads from cold, grey clay.
Our model is Beatrice, pronounced the Italian way.
We dress our armatures, then stand, measure,
observe with callipers as she turns in our centre.
We knead and need, cleave leaden lump to lump
until it breathes. Beneath our pressing fingers,
shapes are unleashed over weeks. We caress,
curse, battle vexation until the end. It is a shock.
Each one has captured her and yet the six heads
are nothing like each another. I wonder
what we each see of human nature’s duplicity.
Six portrait heads in clay was published in Issue 44 of Ingénue Magazine, July 2024
Make it stand out
Chanctonbury Dawn
Beneath the ancient burh
she rests with alloyed dagger
waiting. A ring
of beech trees
bumbershoot
the barrows.
Perhaps she carried
a wooden bowl carved
from an alder tree,
dared her soul for soup.
When she turned over,
the beeches fell.
Link arms now with me
across centuries.
Create new
strongholds.
Wake, weapon-wielder,
Bronze Age sister.
Chanctonbury Dawn was published in Dawntreader Vol. 67, June 2024
Also-rans
Sylvia left school at 14, preterm, to look
after her brothers when her mother died.
Too soon she qualified in caring and quickly
became bogged down in domesticity.
Pat, conversely, 11-plussed it to the local Grammar
where the masters mostly ensured an education
in shame, though he managed to overcome the worst
of his stammer while hitting the books.
Quick with numbers, skilled in budgeting on nothing,
Sylvia blagged a betting shop job calculating
accumulators. Pat was a gambler, quick with figures
from long hours of algebraic equations.
They met across the smoky bookies’ counter
when he took a punt each-way in the three o’clock
at Ascot. She dreamed of freedom while he
contemplated graduation. Neither factored
a child before they were out of the starting stalls.
They rented a tiny flat together - with hurdles -
where the going was never good. Simple maths
that neither could solve. Dead heat.
Also-rans was longlisted in the Wildfire Words FF150 Anthology competition 2024. There is an audio recording of Theresa reading her work.
Conversation with the Moyta Charioteer,
British Museum
Here you are, standing haughty-eyed, jaunty-hipped.
Through to the limestone bones of your arrogant legs
you have the X-factor preserved in muscled marble.
Pert buttocks pose in hardened faux-fabric tunic folds
which a plaque calls your 'xystis'. I’ll choose my own
pronunciation. Your toil is over, your race won:
fame forever. Well done.
My xystis is a crumpled apron. My chariot a pram.
My existence is my children, who swarm the museum.
I sweat to think they might touch something
of your white antiquity. Hooded eyes and aching hips
frame sagging flesh to form my victory stance.
And pert buttocks? After three kids, not a chance.
Why would I want to be statued anyway?
Who would seek paralysis through petrifaction
to be stared at in blindness everyday?
I only get turned to stone for transgressing.
Enjoy your pillar of salt. This Iodame lives
and demands not stone, but fire.
The Motya Charioteer was on temporary display at the British Museum in London for the duration of the 2012 Olympics.
Conversation wtih the Motya Charioteer was published as the third placed entry in the 2023/2024 RC Sherriff Trust ‘Fame’ competition in April 2024
Soap
The scent of lavender or rose
on the breeze also means
to smell pink carbolic soap,
to notice on the window ledge
the tangibility of making do.
Beyond the window,
are snapdragons and their bees,
the buddleia and butterflies,
and crabapples and cuckoo spit
and cooking apples and shady vine.
Inside, slivers and scraps join together
to make a new bar, marble-edged
though nobbly and cracked.
A sudless impossibility smelted
together with the dirt
of other people’s hands
to purify the convergence of toil,
a kind of love in a grimy dish.
Published in Wildfire Words Confluence and Collaboration Anthology January 2024
Email Etiquette, Head of English
It lands in my inbox with a heavy thud. Line
after line of anxious text about a new student.
Precious offspring of another fretting parent.
How long is an email ‘page’? It seems to go on
for eons: litany of failure, and at first I’m disinclined
to help. Yeah, yeah. I skim-read the electronic tome
searching for the salient bits, the headline,
some things her teachers can do something
about that don’t involve counselling for the sender,
suffering from a severe case of Year Seven syndrome.
No need to read the whole thing, I tap out
Instead read Tolstoy, it’ll be quicker! Winky face.
Just move Lily to the front away from Jake; change
her reading book. I intend to forward to the right
staff but in haste hit REPLY ALL, then doubt,
check, curse digital speed, and no undo function.
A reply comes back within minutes. Two lines only:
I will be sure to limit my too-verbose words in future,
and thank you for looking out for Lily. Smiley face.
It’s the tell-tale coordinating conjunction
that makes me think of my own, too-fast growing daughter.
What this mother really wants is for me to rewind
the clock, return her child, beat back the waves
of experience washing over her. I can’t stop either
drowning in the ticking tide of secondary-school water.
Published in Wildfire Words TIcking Clock Anthology
December 2023
The difference between girls and boys
I’m only five when I’m asked if I know
the difference between boys and girls.
I do, of course: girls wear tights.
Wretched things, all encasing, wrinkled,
twisted up, wrong-way-round heels,
something lumpy but unreachable
near the toes. Or falling down,
sweaty, stretchy, saggy crotch-drop.
If only the tyranny of tights
was the worst of it.
Later, the teenage slagginess
of a ladder, lacing up the thigh.
A hole in your hosiery.
But oh, when you worked at it until
you felt the satisfying rip
of destruction, and release.
Published in Washed with Noon,
Vole Books Summer Anthology 2023
October 2023, and read as the penultimate poem at the Arundel Literary Festival 2024, video below.
Ted Gooda reads The softness of sisters, I’m here, Whimsy, The difference between boys and girls, A child tiptoes into a restaurant kitchen
Listen
People listened to me once when
I had nothing to say, but dew-fresh skin
proclaimed womb functioning.
Today I stretch my face, smooth away
fine lines that jump back in rage,
shouting about cessation. Strange
I was only thought relevant
before the painful labour of vitality
delivered to grand climacteric.
Shame. Your loss. This crone’s caul
means I speak less these days, though
I have seen and know much more.
Published in All Things Menopause, June 2023
‘A child tiptoes into a restaurant kitchen and ‘Stepping Stone’ are published in the Dempsey & Windle Anthology Poetry is not Dead (May 2023) after being shortlisted in the BRIAN DEMPSEY MEMORIAL PRIZE 2023.
‘Tides’ and ‘Seeds’ were published in the West Sussex Writers’ anthology, WSW85
December 2022
Village Inn
Two red cartwheels stand in the passageway,
recalling old hostlers at the ancient hostelry;
resting point on London stagecoach Sussex artery.
Archives insist on wheeling through the archway
of time to create new chronicles. The long-ago is here
and now with ghostly imprints on each barstool.
At first the pub was the only three-storeyed
place in the village, and the pint-sized stories grew.
We started a new fire when we moved in. The inn
closed for weeks with an unstable chimney stack;
old smoke kindled in wispy trails, rising to join
who knows whom? Hearty faces spoofed
through pre-Google arguments growing pale
at last orders: Wurzel and that damn dawg,
the whisky-swilling actuary, John the egg.
They’re there still. In the end we’re all just passing through.
We pause a while; share a tale over a nip or two.
Published in the Village Tweet, December 2022, p.28
Cards on the table
Some Sunday evenings
in the seventies shaped
by playing card games
with my parents, a surprise
treat. The grownupness
of rummy. Counting,
remembering, keeping score.
Happy families for a moment.
That game where play
continues until no family
members are left
separated. Master. Miss.
Mr and Mrs. Imagine.
Patterns to aspire to,
then fight against. Snap.
Published by Wildfire Words
October 2022
Holding Hands
That child once knew
the instruction to
‘hold out your hand’
and how it never had a happy ending.
The child also knew
how to recite in order
Genesis to Lamentations
(alongside the Periodic Table)
so she didn't have
to hold out her hand.
This child knew that to come
home late to a locked door
might be cloudy in that moment
but was probably argentum-filled
and she held on to that.
The child should not have known
the language of the bookmaker
but she was fluent, and saw
what was held and changed hands.
This child well knew that when
ten pound notes were burned in the grate
it wasn't time for a hand out.
That child grew
and learned to handwrite
her own happy endings.
Published by Wildfire Words
October 2022
Breasting the Wave
Twelve week ultrasound scan:
womb with view and calendar
of extra visits for geriatric mother.
Small lump, lower left breast.
engages a different type of scan.
Less congratulatory. Frowns
replace smiles. Biopsy,
mammogram, McMillan nurse.
Precancerous cells:
also called premalignant.
That little prefix disquiets.
Prenatal, one believes, leads to birth.
Preschool isn't the end of education.
Premeditated is with intent.
Should one be preconcerned?
Severe dysphasia. Atypical
lobular hyperplasia.
Long words that might turn
into a long sentence.
How tricky you’ve made things
the surgeon accuses. Ducts
everywhere: engorged
breasts. A nightmare under
the knife for him – as if
I have engorged them
out of spite. I weep milk.
Published by Wildfire Words
October 2022
Sunday Mass
We went out of habit
after a childhood of nuns and dark corridors
and there is a peace in familiar ritual. Still
how pious you look
with your head bent in prayer and your thoughts
elsewhere; wandering anywhere but heaven. I learn
I like the feeling of the toddler nestling
into me even if he's falling asleep bored
and it’s easy to get the giggles when
you have to be quiet. It only needs
someone tall walking back from communion
and a tennis head swivel. I see
how the stations of the cross
resemble helicopters from a distance
and my incense sticks don't come close
to the intense, evocative aroma here. I bear
witness to the way light changes over an hour
through stained glass instead of searching
my stained soul. I reflect on a tranquil time
away from work and house, free from sins,
plan the day ahead. And I like the hymns.
Published in The Cannon’s Mouth Issue 85
Quarterly Poetry Journal, September 2022
Tides
It looks like a pork scratching or cracked bat wing. Maybe
a beetle body turned upside down, skeletal debris
from a scalding cauldron, dusk-discarded.
With the toe of my boot I dislodge the empty husk. Hard
to believe this brittle embryo-carcass was once fluid, sea-soft.
A membraned, pulsing capsule of some wave-tossed
creature and her kin, delicate tentacles curtseyed
to Neptune with treasure packed inside a mermaid
purse. And I remember the surly teenager
with her sand-fin tail, who walked old summers here.
Now, autumn rain pinches cold across the beach.
I shiver inside my hood, flinch at the seagull’s screech.
Winner of the West Sussex Writers’ Poetry Competition 2022,
judged by Jon McCulloch
The daisy and the bellbind
The grass could do with mowing.
Daisies cluster with their sisters.
White bellbind trumpets triumph
in twining blasts along the wall.
Purple florets unfurl white
soonest in sunny hours,
easing each new day’s eye. Bolder
rhythms embroider fresh chains of time.
And daisies smile of old time:
smooth faces tilted skywards
lying in fields, making loose
chains; mouthing multi-futures.
Do new fortunes still exist
when, mid-June, time slips its shackles?
I leave the grass. Instead, to curb
those trumpet bells heralding
days’ ends, I cut their clockwise
strangling bindweed stems.
Published by Wildfire Words July 2022
Send in the clouds
I want blue sky,
unending blue,
cloudless air blue,
midsummer blue,
lush green canopy of oaktree blue,
dazzling blue of yellow sunflowers,
sweet, smooth blue of vanilla ice cream,
red-chequered picnic-cloth blue,
golden blue of beer-garden pint,
graceful, swooping kite-tail blue,
rich sand-between-the-toes blue.
But I know
I need the clouds
to pearl the summer,
ripen the green,
true the blue.
Published by Wildfire Words July 2022
Long Sky
the gauze thinned
so briefly between two worlds
and we felt liminal: caught out
in the spinning tilt of the globe that winter
when planets aligned
for the great conjunction at an unequal equinox
but found no universal fix for the longest darkest
epoch we have known still summer brings
cataplasm of possibility in its solstice poultice
of long sky spread taut
over the smarting skin
of swollen earth
Published by Wildfire Words July 2022
Silver to Platinum
I remember seeing through legs in a crowd,
and stretching to hold mum’s hand for safety
and a colourful flag that made a nice noise
when I flapped it hard in my tight fist
and the taste of ice cream soda.
The queen looked a bit like Grandma.
She certainly sounded like her.
I must get orf from the branches of the apple tree
because climbing in a dress was unseemly,
and it was important to use the right cutlery.
Later there was a wedding with a proper
princess in it and things in fairy stories
could be real. That dress was Cinderella’s,
the carriage might turn into a pumpkin
and ice cream soda was for babies.
Grown up, I didn’t mind the monarchy, quite
enjoyed the colour and pageantry,
pomp and ceremony in some far-off way:
easier not to examine ideology.
Later still there was the sadness of funerals.
I felt the collective outpouring of grief,
but could not explain why I felt loss for faces
that I’d only stuck down into sticker books,
tongue glued to philtrum with effort,
leaving very unprincess-like red marks.
Now a platinum jubilee. Metal that
is malleable, can withstand tensile stress.
There’s been too much of that for all
those women, and so that little child inside of me
is somehow still flapping her flag furiously.
Writers Bureau Jubilee Competiton Winner
Also appeared in The Cannon’s Mouth Issue 85 September 2022
Elements
I read that the human body
was seventy percent water.
I know this to be true: you
hear the drops as they spill-splash.
White heat turns to water,
as the river washes along years
meandering this way and that.
Some jettisoned debris gathers
on our shores. It can be hazardous.
Moments of strong current propel
towards vast, dark pools. Once
a wooden boat capsized.
We had laughed moments before,
but came up spluttering desperate,
hoping our skin could hold it all in.
Infinity Books UK Love the Words 2022
Winners Anthology
Station Road Gardens
I take the familiar route. I'm surprised each time
the dogs aren't interested in bird hedge
on a noisy morning of village tweets.
But today, something else is on the air:
palimpsest traces crossing boundary rope.
Preoccupied with treats, poo bags, I need eyes
in the back of my head. ‘Good recall,’ observes
a fellow walker. He means the dogs, but still,
eyes in the mind recall ghostly shapes, other
times my footsteps have scored this landscape.
Funny, there was no gate once, no fence at all,
so a four might trickle off the ground and over
pavement edges, or a six connect with parked car.
Beyond, pitchblend: that gentle mound was flat,
about mid-wicket bowling from the Weald School end.
There, behind the community notice board
is where we drank rum and danced to steel drums.
Listen. Maybe their calypso rhythms echo faintly still.
And here, where the old pavilion stood proud
nestles different, newer, play-train wood.
Past the three horse chestnut trees, an empty square,
ring-fenced. I clutch the air where the receiver hung,
recall the sweet stink of tobacco-wee once trapped
behind red-framed panes, think of all the ten-pees
spent telling Mum the train was running late.
There's a bench in the place where we used to lie
on the grass and read the Sunday papers in sunshine,
long before summer follies or Picnics in the Park.
Or did we only do that once? It's hard to say.
I’d forgotten, though I come here every day.
Seeds
Genesis.
In late winter I sowed so many seeds,
spending time in a blindly hopeful gamble:
covered them in dirt knowing nothing
would appear at all for weeks, if ever.
Petulant frost did for some, one starred night
when the greenhouse door was left wide open;
heat did for more when scorching sun crippled
through radiating glass that should protect.
Exodus.
In April, I planted out, after what
I’d heard was the last of the cold. It wasn’t.
Demeter’s grief had miles further to run,
adding to my hurt. Nodding bedding plants,
begonia and petunia, lost their heads.
Little red mouths stopped smiling. Frozen
corpses lay in that cold bed, unblanketed.
Leviticus.
My daughter, high priestess of Pinterest
taste, helped with re-planting. She wore
my gloves, hands nearly my size,
I had to show her how to break hard ground.
I watched her choose new places, pattern earth.
So more of that blasted blind hope returns,
with Persephone, broadcast to the winds.
First published by Sentinel, 2021
Down the Bowling Alley
My new school friend knocked for me
to go with her to the ‘bowling alley’.
I'd never been to one but thought of finding
giant mechanisms to reset the ninepins
after spares and strikes, like in films on VHS.
I was surprised when mum said yes,
learned that playing till dusk was the rule
for year-round going out after school.
I wore clean socks and pocketed
a shiny twenty pence piece to spend.
Through a wooded twitten came an open glade
at the foot of a steep bank by a decayed
sail-free tower. It was striking and spare:
a tree sprung from the bricks in the threadbare
brambled branches that hid brown glass
bottles. My socks got muddy in long grass.
There was nowhere to squander my coin
only slot machines for childhood time
where we spent wildly, toppling forward
through dreams and games and awkward
hurtling down that slope screaming symphonic
swearwords on top of an upturned car bonnet.
Today just a small wooded slope remains
beneath meandering landscaped lanes
that gravel their way in neat striations.
by the old windmill’s preserved foundations.
And finally a long-felt mystery is solved
about how our bowling alley evolved:
first named as neutral ground for skittles’ club
fixtures between the high street’s rival pubs
a century before we played as kings
of that childhood castle, and outdoor pins.
Question Time
"Well?"
The words hang
in the air
communicating the opposite.
Some seek sanctuary
in the blank pages in front of them
while others bury heads down
avoiding the teacher's eye entirely.
One student clears his throat
and there is a hopeful surge
but still no response comes.
The classroom is a sarcophagus.
They may all die here.
The pregnant hush that has descended
rages like the roar of ocean
and they drown collectively in the silence.
A head turns towards the window
searching for escape;
for one marvellous moment
they might float out from it
away from this constricting hell.
But the latches remain mockingly shut,
the air stifling.
"Anyone?"
The teacher's probe is desperate.
The repeated question celebrates
their collective failure to know.
The bell rings: Chairs scrape
signalling the start of the barging race
to join the explosive fizz
of students out in to the corridor.
One figure only is still by the window
braced against the shudder of misgiving,
recalling her own desire to flee
just a moment before.
Published in English in Education (2020) 54(2), p. 119
Covid Sleep
My son goes wandering in the night.
He’s safe at home through the day,
but you can’t lockdown the mind of a child
that wants to get up and unplay.
Early nights mean even more sleep,
and that sleep, perchance, to dream.
Half-waking terrors infect the dark
in a horrible unseen livestream.
Last night, wide-eyed, he grabbed my arm.
‘Sssh, Mum. It’s there, underneath .
Stay with me, don’t leave me alone.’
His terror is real; I can’t breathe
and then I am child again too.
When the wind blows, I still feel
like not wanting to sleep in the dark;
just in case that the warning was real.
By morning, of course it’s all gone.
We’re back in the safe light of day.
But whatever you say, son, I’m listening;
I can’t make it all go away.
Published by National Writing Project, March 2020
On Red Wheelbarrows
(With belated apologies to William Carlos Williams)
Oh that red wheelbarrow -
Nothing whatsoever depends upon it.
And yet, perhaps,
as the man with the same
surname and first name said:
So much depends
upon
it.
I hated that wheelbarrow.
It must be something other.
I knew words like symbolism
and juxtaposition
and preposition.
So why red?
Why white?
Why a wheelbarrow?
Why upon?
How angry it made me feel.
Perhaps some punctuation
might have helped.
Where were the capital letters?
Was it a poem
about a poem?
My English teacher laughed.
Now
after all,
I sit
English teacher myself
coaxing more students
to depend
upon
red wheelbarrows.
Published in English in Education Autumn 2016