Martyn Crucefix

The digits have flapped like an animated cartoon book telling a likely story.

I’m late home because I’ve been watching another woman, knowing she watched me.

I’m the hotter for you. As I slide into your lap, you laugh in my face, teeth and tongue

glistening in your mouth, and grasp me by the wrists. But a stray finger dabs twice

at a button on my watch. As we lock our...

All I recall of him is the day he showed me a gleaming air-gun with its tobacco-tin of fluent pellets. He motioned to a pair of sparrows on the line – and shot one down. The other ruffled, but held its ground, black eyes anxious, searching left and right – killed by the grunt of the re-loaded gun, a crash of weeping feathers on the ground.

They’d always out in the end – or so it was claimed – of their own accord. Then why did he vividly recall gouging at the wrinkled pad of his index with a brutal pin picked from the sewing-box?

Strange how the years go by how less and less the need arises to plough flesh after some buried speck. Always black as a thorn whatever the source. Driving a fork through clay,...