Guest poet: Tom Warner

A Little Thing A walk was your idea; the freezing morning the one place you found fit for a confession. You looked anxious, a conspirator with something under your coat, just big enough to be a bomb, to warrant treading carefully over the leafy puddles and the beechnuts that broke like bones under our feet. You were sick on the path, folded over your own arm, beneath the first crackling of rain. And outside the park, birds spoke from aerials, made arrangements with insects that waited for summer, waited to come up from their heavy mud and swim to an uncompromising light.

A Boy's Game Nose down, the rat-silhouette skirted round rubbled bricks, a washing machine; things dumb and ripped and piled up. Automatic, bound to tracks like a toy train. It was all fun. We were only playing at watching the bulbed shape through one eye. Our airgun bit down. And we didn't consider how the echo tried to stay on between the houses and the slag-heap, how the sky refused to answer. The game changed. I watched you lifting that dress over your thigh, saw it slide like liquid around your hips and onto the grass each side. No place to lay foundations ­ a covered-over pit-tip, landscaped, spiked with thin trees and gorse. The loose soil was liable to shift and slip, could have swallowed us; animals down a tunnel, dissolving without a sound.