Kathryn Simmonds

Spring again   But from where no telling     Sweet as the spring       That went before         Same old story     But still compelling   Blossom reminding What blossom is for   Question the trees   But they’re not telling     How they obey    

Twelve? Thirteen? She arrives in advance of her parents, fat as I was thin, wrapped in a towel, pattering to safety — a bench where she sits obscured before abandoning herself to the indecency of a walk towards water, (though who’s to see? To care? The retirees? Me with my puckered stomach?) My eyes meet

Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound

Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound

Fate landed us here by mistake, set us to walk Welsh hillsides with a plodding heart or paddle Essex estuaries under duress, our talk always of somewhere else (tacked to kitchen walls a Swedish lake, a mountain range in Switzerland). See us crouch in living rooms as daylight palls, an old draught trespassing beneath the

Self-adhesive suns they glow fluorescent on grey monitors wanting for a world ess misremembered. Oh, how biddable! Our paper geisha girls, dancing in an open window breeze, only to die the deaths of petals curling, ips unpeeling from a disappearing love.

mooch about and waste time starting things they’ll never finish. The next world is nothing to them but shadows, some don’t have patience for any of that crap at all – What, grass, they say, waving their wobbly arms, You mean you actually believe in grass?