Paul Batchelor lectures in English literature and creative writing at Durham University. His last publication was a chapbook, The Love Darg, published in 2014.
Just as, after the affair, when I knew I was in the clear but came down with trismus of all things and had, needs must, to post the ‘finest sashimi in Brooklyn’ through the half-inch letterbox between my upper & my lower incisors poking it in there with the chopsticks yearning to contribute in a non-confrontational way to Miss X & her sister & her...
Sighs & groans. As it crawls to a standstill the train becomes a fortress.
Outside: pitiless silence. Emptied sky. Snowbound farms. Ever-deepening blue.
The vulnerable economies of owl & fox. Fields brushed, as by a comet’s tail, with winter.
No announcement. No sign of the guard. We have reached the threshold, it is everywhere at once
in depthless white drifts unbroken...
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