English Archives - Scottish Poetry Library

{ Poem }

Critics heard a metaphor. / But after he died, his archive was found: / a thousand tapes of silence-

{ Poem }

If only I could hear the soundtrack. Anyone / in this business knows that nothing good comes / after an embrace like that.

{ Poem }

Nì grian nan uinneagan àrda / Pàtrain ealanta / A leansas mo pheansail air pàipear.

{ Poem }

Digesting other life, against its will, / diversified after the early Cambrian.

{ Poem }

And the sky opens out above all the glass / inaccessible VIP pathways. / How did we get here like this?

{ Poem }

The other planes only come at night. They swoop in
grey and big-bellied.

{ Poem }

We are reflecting what you want to see. If we are not possessed by me, we are possessed. / The ruins of our wombs and twisting dust at noon.

{ Poem }

outside she flexes in her silver sequin sheath / and everyone watches her birl her arse to the / damp-beat-inside-behind the window’s neon

{ Poem }

The wind is dropping, near / silence, except blood surging / through veins, a scrabble / behind the skirting.

{ Poem }

This delicate work requires: / the capacity to hold fog in a spider’s web / whilst cleaning fear from the bedroom carpet;

{ Poem }

across the park a blushing smudge / middle-distance in the pink / closer up dense hooflike buds

{ Poem }

Early one morning, the faithful / slip into La petite église / between grey banks of rock.

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