My first time in New York, by the Hudson, under a black umbrella. So much rain, waterlogged shoes, and Miss Liberty draped in cloud and fog. Open umbrellas in an open-topped bus, watercolour city. Dodging puddles on Fifth Avenue, we found shelter under awnings. New York dripping in my ears, American sentences in the rain. […]
Tag: Imaginary Garden with Real Toads
Malevolent, Me?
You may think me obsequious, creepy and cadaverous, a hand-wringing usurer and sly blackmailer, but I did it all for love. I cannot help the alabaster hands that manipulate my master, the delicate brows and lashes framing blood red eyes. I know I am despised. My name may sound infectious, possibly pernicious, but it’s an […]
Invisible
We are invisible, held together by dark matter. We speckle emptiness, galaxies strung like diamonds on taffy pulled by space and time in an expanding universe, sculpted and dented by gravity into a map of invisibility. Kim M. Russell, 2017 Image found on Pinterest My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads – Invisible Today […]
Bridge of Lies
He thought she was a sucker, a con man’s dream, taken in by promises of Italian ice cream, a bottle of prosecco and a gondola ride under the Rialto and the Bridge of Sighs. But she had built her own bridge of lies; an experienced hustler with a scam of her own, she took all […]
In the canteen…
the women from the shop floor compare notes – the new fore- man’s cute. They speculate whether he’s available and watch together as he approaches the counter. The girl behind the steaming urn eyes him up as he waits his turn, smiles and flutters lashes like spiders’ legs, gives him an extra helping of scrambled […]
Ruminations on Writing
I was recently reminded I’m getting old, a greying guest of nature, mother and wife. In an attempt to solve the riddle of my soul, I gnaw and chew life out of life. Stiff fingers falter, they fumble, writing is a spidery scrawl on a page; as I peck at the keyboard, words tumble, I […]
Another Cinderella
Fairy tales are never true, happy endings are not for me and you, pinioned by our rustic lives as daughters, sisters, mothers, wives. With the future so uncertain, we cower behind our dingy curtains, praying for footmen, never a prince – they’d be so much harder to convince that beneath our neglected exteriors breathe princesses, […]
Sugar Daddy
Daddy, you eat all the sugar and leave me bleeding, a blistered foot with no shoe, you do, and I will have to kill and sculpture you into a blue marble statue, bastard, you. You were the universe, the moon my mistress, if I had but known your crazed intent to render me a manless, […]
A South London Heaven
Across the football pitch on this side of the rails is wild fennel and long grass: a jungle for snails. There’s a wild damson tree, hawthorn and crab apples, where we lie, you and me, below leafy dapples. In summer there’s sunshine, in winter there’s snow; I love spring and autumn, when trees bloom and […]
Reverse Orbit
Earth is a small blue fingernail whose distant seas and undulations spill colour on early spring mornings here in space I conjure in my imagination primroses, daffodils and tulips warming a leafless woodland that still drips with winter thaw space is a colourless formula a soundless, boundless set of laws that keep me orbiting, a […]
writing in north norfolk 