Swallows
in the café on Rue Lepic, I sit with a little green fairy in front of me, the absinthe gone louche and cloudy now, a slow swirling storm in the glass that brings its own dull and necessary release from the absolute. the flavours move through the mouth in their old way — fennel and
Broken Homes
it’s a bitch trying to miss them on that black path before dawn, stumbling half-drunk on sleep with your eyes still glued shut from last night’s whiskey. you try, Christ you try, squinting into the nothing, but it always ends the same: a wet pop under the shoe and the morning gets its first taste
The Drought
the barns bulge with a perverse rot, heaps of fruit gone black and swollen, produce twisted in mildew and blight under the long dead eye of the sun. and out on the land the cattle fall, one by one, legs buckling into the dust like broken prayers nobody’s listening to anymore. frustration sworn into every