She is surrounded by patchwork fields as vivid as an artist’s impression: here and there a stone church or umber farmhouse scattered across her apron stained with hues of olive, grape, tomato, and scented with rosemary, basil, oregano, zesty lemons and aromatic espresso. She stretches her limbs along the Arno, terracotta roofs reflecting heat and […]
Mind Map of a Forgotten Coast
Our coastal skin shrank as knowledge grew; why have we forgotten paths and dunes devoured by an increasingly hungry sea? Never sated, the leviathan lingers on the shore until its rumbling belly sends it back for more. Ancient rock has turned to crumbling cliffs and sand. There are no maps to fathom what lies beneath, […]
Reading is No Sin
I’ve never heard a mockingbird, a New World multilingual, and I’ve never seen one fly. But I have climbed inside numberless books, read numberless words, breathed numberless characters’ lives, walked around in their skin and thought their thoughts. Characters are the only kind of folk I ever felt comfortable with, willingly lent my reader’s ear, […]
Shakespeare First
I have always loved Will’s work from the moment I was introduced to his plays at school, and I remember falling in love with the sonnets as if it was only yesterday. The first poems I wrote as a teenager were sonnets and I still fall into the form when I least expect it. The […]
Served from the Heart (revisited)
l u r […]
A Moment
I took a real moment, not a virtual corona one, to step out into the garden, under cover of the darkest night. White noise and rustle of leaves – the only human sound was the distant hum of tyre on tarmac, a delivery truck perhaps. It was quiet and so dark I could not see […]
Heavy Suitcase
They took away my suitcase. There wasn’t much in it: a book to read, clean underwear, a nice dress for visiting hours (no one ever comes) and church on Sundays, moisturising cream for my hands and face. I didn’t think I’d be here long. Now I need to fill it with the weight of nightmare […]
Tesselated
honeycomb hexagons too narrow for fingers but just right for bees conjuring honey from pollen tidy and tessellated sticky-sweet Kim M. Russell, 24th April 2020 My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads NaPoWriMo Day 24 Play it Again in April 2020: Wild Woman’s Natural Wonders On Wednesday 24th April, 2019, Sherry inspired us with […]
A Love Story (for bewildered girls)
After tomorrow, Saturday will unfurl in a gathering light: the beginning of the world in the middle of the night. There are faces in the water inside my head. I collect postcards from no man’s land that no one’s ever read. That’s how I live now, all alone in a house of sand and fog. […]
Shakespeare’s Women
If I were to save a piece of Will, from all the pleasure he has given me, I’d need the wit of Beatrice to sway my choice and the cunning of the Nurse to keep it to myself: the women who populate his plays, living on today in modern Mirandas and Violets, Ophelias, Lady Macbeths, […]
writing in north norfolk 