…eyes on my skin, small hellos and howeyas in smoking areas and bathroom queues / imagined passengers in passing cars feel like scalpel incisions – the flaying of a beast. I crumple into nothing under floodlights of sight.

start with a bruised body and the wrong knife, take a hound’s eye: follow the pierce and spatter, little globules seething as red thumbs dig to outrun the decay.

After all, who wouldn’t rather fractions over fractures?

/ Nana said / she knew a thing or two about living / born at the fag end of the century / into just-above poverty / she walked a mile to church / three times every Sunday / for the salvation of her six- year-old soul