English-Poems

• It was late September. I'd just poured a glass of wine, begun to unwind, while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen filled with the smell of itself, relaxed, its steamy breath gently blanching the windows. So I opened one, then with my fingers wiped the other's glass like a brow.
• He was standing under the pear tree snapping a twig. Now the garden was long and the visibility poor, the way the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky, but that twig in his hand was gold. And then he plucked a pear from a branch – we grew Fondante d'Automne – and it sat in his palm like a lightbulb. On.
• I thought to myself, Is he putting fairy lights in the tree? He came into the house. The doorknobs gleamed. He drew the blinds. You know the mind; I thought of the Field of the Cloth of Gold and of Miss Macready.
• He sat in that chair like a king on a burnished throne. The look on his face was strange, wild, vain. I said, What in the name of God is going on? He started to laugh.
• I served up the meal. For starters, corn on the cob. Within seconds he was spitting out the teeth of the rich. He toyed with his spoon, then mine, then with the knives, the forks. He asked where was the wine. I poured with a shaking hand, a fragrant, bone-dry white from Italy, then watched as he picked up the glass, goblet, golden chalice, drank.
• It was then that I started to scream. He sank to his knees. After we'd both calmed down, I finished the wine on my own, hearing him out. I made him sit on the other side of the room and keep his hands to himself. I locked the cat in the cellar. I moved the phone. The toilet I didn't mind.
• I couldn't believe my ears: how he'd had a wish. Look, we all have wishes; granted. But who has wishes granted? Him. Do you know about gold? It feeds no one; aurum, soft, untarnishable; slakes no thirst. He tried to light a cigarette; I gazed, entranced, as the blue flame played on its luteous stem. At least, I said, you'll be able to give up smoking for good.
• You could travel up the Blue Nile with your finger, tracing the route while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery
• Places chanted by Mrs Tilscher

  • Tana
  • Ethiopia
  • Khartoum
  • Aswan
• For an hour, then a skittle of milk and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust
• A window opened with a long pole
• The laugh of a bell swung by a running child
• This was better than home. Enthralling books
• The classroom glowed like a sweet shop
• Things in the classroom

  • Sugar paper
  • Coloured shapes
• Brady and Hindley faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake
• Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found she'd left a good gold star by your name
• The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved
• A xylophone's nonsense heard from another form
• Over the Easter term, the inky tadpoles changed


  1. From commas

  2. Into exclamation marks
• Three frogs hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce, followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking away from the lunch queue
• A rough boy told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared at your parents, appalled, when you got back home
• That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity
• A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot, fractious under the heavy, sexy sky
• You asked her how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled, then turned away
• Reports were handed out
• You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown, as the sky split open into a thunderstorm
• My parents' anxiety stirred


  • like a loose tooth
  • in my head.
• You forget, or don't recall, or change


  • and, seeing your brother swallow a slug, feel only
  • a skelf of shame.
• • Do I only think
  • I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space
  • and the right place?
• Strangers ask


  • Where do you come from?
  • Originally?
• And I hesitate.
• The train this slow evening goes down England browsing for the right sky, too blue swapped for a cool grey.
• For miles I have been saying What like is it the way I say things when I think.
• Nothing is silent. Nothing is not silent. What like is it.
• I am homesick, free, in love with the way my mother speaks.
• 'Not a red rose or a satin heart.'
• 'I give you an onion.'
• 'It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.'
• 'It promises light like the careful undressing of love.'