I have a new poem in Taddle Creek Magazine

Taddle Creek Magazine has been good to me over the years, and I'm happy they wanted to publish one of my poems in their latest issue. They've got the poem up on their website now, so you can have a look without evening buying the magazine, which you should do anyway, because they have lots of great stuff.


Anyway, here's the poem:

Sugar Transformed By the Sun

“Whatever can / be destroyed is going to be destroyed. Patience, patience. / Hate what needs to be hated. All is finished. All’s completed.” —A. F. Moritz.

Skin. An eye. An ulcer. Whatever
can bleed will be torn by the nail
or the knife. Matter that ripens, that
rots, will be cuisine for the grubs.
If it can burn, be it paper,
or muscle, or coal, it will be ash
when the sun swells and reddens,
taking the inner planets into its bloom
when the apparatus falters.
Whatever can be destroyed

with a look, with a glance, will stand
before the basilisk, the gorgon,
or the cockatrice, and will petrify
as when the heat escapes, all at once,
from a face, from a forest,
and is swapped with layers of
many-coloured silica...

Read the whole poem here.