From Creator to Creature After the birds and mammals lost their speech (the serpent's tongue having already turned to ash) and Heaven swayed and fell to within four miles of the earth, a disappointed God crept low into the sea’s womb, into Mary, our lady of the ocean, and transmuted his glory into the microscopic, a millimetre in size, living between grains of sand on the sea bed, eventually emerging in the form of a fish.

Contraction After the fusion of blood and tree, I descended, the voice of derision singing in my ears, past the wet-green eyes of my mother, down, past dry lips of statues, falling, through open doors, through graveyards, junkyards, a quarry of dry bones and fridges, past train-wrecks and dead horses, down, past falling towers and exploding engines, down, through smoky forests and palimpsests of mud, through florid rings of fire, past the crushed flowers on the hospital bed,