This downhill roll pulls far hills close, removes the river between the stub field and the chalked snow light on the Sidlaws. No sense of that labour through narrows, the dark which swills the firth, currents past seal-banks, crossed by a strength of bridge. No sense at all. Sometimes that works. © Beth Mcdonough Ed Read More
(after Psalm 19) I miss the symmetry – the call, response – implied in ‘day to day’ and ‘night to night’; I miss that the days gleam, gossipy with news, that their gushing is also the springing of light, the gloss of the blossom that drips into honey. I wish our word for ‘gleam’ was Read More
Slender hands can’t seize chances. So much for that when we breathe the narrowed sleep of reason that bids us tend and bide a husband. Their mariners score them maps, steel-incised empiries hard and spread as their bodies. They lend us a press of wax to imprint our names, their melted flattery, gone with a Read More
The mysterious thin threads of rain, wrist-high beneath a bright February near-cloudlessness, beneath the chiming of the wire and metal masts of the yacht club, over the heads of bairns and dogs: they sheen like web and are gone, while the crows lift and drop, drop and lift, the mussels on the shore. © Read More
I practised deep inhaling, hoping, like you, to float. You travelled so light, your shoes never lined up for cleaning on Saturday nights. I imagined a flutter of postcards, you summoning me. The thick thunk of junk mail daily hit the floor, deposited by the wheezing postie. I named a constellation after you. It’s still Read More
Strathearn Snow Perthshire spirals down, curls inside this bleach bowl. On that flat strath floor, Earn’s eel sparkles black. Cottages shoal to Dunning as single ones are lost. Some fin up Ruthven’s elver burn. Hunch birds of prey wire up, never where they seem. © Beth McDonough Ed: “Strathearn Snow” first appeared in Raum 1(3), Read More
Tickets for Dundee had been collected from passengers on the train before crossing the bridge. A photograph shows the tickets [of] some who lost their lives that night. The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography The Last Train from St Fort They have the stubs, some fifty-six Read More
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: Time is on the wing but he doesn’t seem to like it as he paces up and down the aisle worried about flying perhaps or deep thrombosis until a stewardess makes him take his seat again. My Read More
The car hire company bestows upon you the great gift of abandoning you to the airport overnight. Returned to the eternal striplights of your early travels, you wrap your head in the checkered pakama, place the green Ethiopian Airways eyemask on your face, and insert the orange earplugs which can’t quite block the music of Read More
Before the stiff Monsignor bends To butter me with chrism, do these things for me; air the suit from Gieves & Hawkes, cut to a shape I haven’t been since eighty-three; black and shine my wedding shoes with Cherry Blossom from the tin below the stairs; choose a shirt (collar fifteen and a half), Pringle Read More