The conditions determined by physical, social, economic and environmental factors or processes, which increase the susceptibility of a community to the impact of hazards.

Hyogo Framework for Action, 2006​

 

*

 

Not rain but sleet, box hedge topped white.

Friends visiting sunny Brisbane WhatsApp snaps –    

a Bee Gees statue: three bronze, two tourists

 

singing. We’ve forgotten this morning’s sonic boom.

Chinese refugees are taking the South American

route to the US. The Darién Gap, a pinch

 

of jungle towards elsewhere. There will

be a cancer operation tomorrow. This time 

someone we know. ICU on standby

 

for haemorrhaging. A friend has asked

to phone tonight, perhaps about her husband.

The cancer he has he can’t pronounce –

 

as if we can speak things into existence

as if we can mangle them out.

 

*

 

16°c the PC screen says. Droplets trail

the windowpane, the mallow closes pink

on itself. Cold enough for a fleece.

 

I stay indoors, observe the shaking garden,

the daylilies’ brief mouths. What is safe?

Our brass-handled chest, the smoothness

 

of the sea-washed pebble quiet

on the windowsill? Two crows blow south.   

Jackdaw and woodpigeon. Europe is braced   

 

for the ‘hottest day ever’ as ‘Cerberus’ rages.  
I open Kathleen, definition p.12: ‘things of value  

that are exposed to the potential for harm’.

 

Sweat slicks my lip. I drink hot water

– pollen, photons, words – we are breached.   

 

*

 

Overhead light yellows the blue chill.   

Two house sparrows. One cock,

chestnut cap drenched and busy.

 

I roll down my sleeves. Drink coffee.

Poultry workers have tested positive

for bird flu. The new rescue dog is alert –

 

why go towards harm? Better to refuse,   

head down, eyebrows bouncing. But skirts

can drink water, grow heavy, drown you.

 

Sea levels must rise 100 meters here

before we’re submerged. My sister in Denmark

would be under water, too. Somerset, Lincoln-

 

shire mostly gone. I trace future coasts

with my finger: contemplate the power of blue.  

 

*

 

Morning tongue thick with coffee burr.

Microsoft’s banner: drone-footage cityscape. 

Last night Chris Packham. Earth. Pangea massing    

 

half of the globe. Magma. A jolt in trajectory. 

Here cirrus streaks north to south. The sky

hombre blue – ice to baby. A red kite keens.

 

Apples round on our little tree. Breeze cool. The vetch   

has toppled. Suspected lioness loose in Berlin.

Residents told to stay indoors. Shari’s questioning 

 

face fillers. Should she: shouldn’t she? Everyone

else is. We plump our own vision – blotch the globe. 

No edges. Subductions at our cheek. Bone

 

as tundra. A metaphor is to be two places at once.

The fire in the cave. The shadows dancing.    

 

*

 

A dead moth – flattened bronze. Antihistamines  

in a box. Over-sized clouds west to east, under-

bellies of grey. Lavender fills with bumble bees. 

 

Jasmine’s bright trumpets fall. My throat tightens.

Knife crime has surged 16% in just one year.

The rescue dog snaps at the buzzing.

 

Jaws blank, he lies on his stash of tennis balls.

Sheep graze the browning hillside. This summer’s

getaway prompts warnings as 12 million cars

 

hit the road. I scrunch my drying hair.  

An Ecotopian Lexicon offers ‘Blockadia’. Three

First Nations women versus a pipeline. Linked arms. 

 

Civil disobedience in Washington DC. Hunger strikes.

Shadows at the gate. The birch stem shimmers. 

 

*

 

Inflammation bangles my wrist.

Spitting rain. Brief sun on grass.

An aeroplane roars. Wheat has done

 

its work. I make invaders of molecules.

Kyiv claims success as southern fighting  

intensifies. The air we breathe in the UK

 

depends on race and income. Rosebay’s

last flowers sway. A melting Swiss glacier  

has uncovered a climber missing since 1986.

 

The swirl of an empty snail shell. Mossed cracks.   

Up to 60% of wildfires are man-made. Claims  

that the heatwave is bogus are spreading online.  

The screen explains sensitivity. What I eat  

I am. I am what I breathe – a system hyperalert.

 

*

 

The word means shape shifter, our other  

animal self. Twin. Mirror. Coupled skin.

I am my jaguar. She barks, sharply, 

 

the guest dog. Her belly a raw reactive pink.

This month is set to be the world’s warmest. Tick bites

mean a surge in meat allergy, the US warns.

 

There’s a ball at my feet. Two eyes on me. I throw

the ball. It lands in the lavender. Retrieval is sweet. 

Jasmine flowers have massed beneath the bench. 

 

The computer hums. My index finger radiantly aches.  

She makes that noise – half growl half sneeze.

Daylilies close orange. Weedlings. I cream and talc  

 

her ruptured skin. She stiffens. Upstairs, you block

your ears, tra-la-la our narrowing waveband.  

 

*

 

Yesterday Oppenheimer. Big Boy and a smuggled

humus sandwich in the cinema’s plump darkness.

Today spectacles bridge my nose. The rescue dog’s

 

nose flares as he cranes towards the window. 17°c.

The view from bed overcast. Blurred trees sway.

Giant space ‘umbrella’ tied to asteroids

 

could protect Earth from climate crisis. Too sick

to fight. Somaticize. Head a chaplet of pressure.

The bathroom extractor flaps half-heartedly.

 

Pigeons froo-froo. Two days to August 6th.

Seventy-eight years since Hiroshima.

Specks of thistledown drift.

 

The neighbour’s roof is clodded with moss.

Upstairs, through the window, wood-carved ƎVO˩.

 

* 

 

Sick. And wordless. 

 

*

 

The Anthropocene Working Group

has proposed Crawford Lake. The golden

spike. Plutonium in the sediments. No one’s

 

mentioned the Belgian Congo – Plutopia,

Ford, p.199: ‘people began to inspect

their memories for confirmation’. Last night

 

David Harwood’s Whiteface. The Mammy

hands, the racialised project. Ally/ perpetrator

– how to knock at the door of another skin?

 

Under the dog star, light fills the screen entirely

and beyond – a rose aglow and softly petalled.

P&O trunks lock in old anger. Voyages infringe.

 

From beneath, a hull kites between silt and stars.

From above, sails are gulls on mirrored water.

 

*

 

Inside my ribs, a chamber papered in grit

and mucus. Alveoli – little cavity. Ethics.

Human tissue. Lexicon as Petrie dish – words

 

complex as molecules. And still the lungs crackle.

Sleep upright. Next door’s cherry is past fruiting.

A breeze stirs leaves to a languid flap. Not even

 

jackdaws. Bluebottles gone. Highly mutated COVID

variant found in new countries. The rescue dog

faces window-wards. Furrowed clouds. Denmark

 

proposes bill to ban Quran burnings. Not even

a magpie or woodpigeon. My window frames

all there is. A crow cuts the top left corner. The dog

 

flicks his eyebrows, his beard a lion’s point. He sits

upright. Your car returns. Shopping list forgotten.  

 

*

 

Anna Tsing. Søby – Danish brownfield site.   

Hard science. A skew of truth. Like a gull poised   

on the breeze, Denmark’s flat. All sky and Skagerrak.   

 

Oat milk sits cold in my middle. The thud of a bee  

on the window. Steroid spray. Tinnitus – the ringing   

alarm. The wind chime tings – once – twice.  

Why was there no water to fight the fire in Maui?  
A break in the clouds shows mackerel sky. The raven   

clonks on her flight north. UK weather: more than   

 

half a month’s rain to fall in South of England. I’ve   

a shadow-pen on my page. Rain-battered lavender.  
A ginger-backed bee mithers the last of the mauve  

 

florets. Rosebay sets seed. The rotting tree stump –   

frass and ivy. Wood weathers to a pewter glow.  

 

*

 

Cells collapse – or get defensive. A drone strike   

on Moscow causes ‘powerful’ explosion three miles   

from Kremlin. It hurts to look up. Bright white clouds  

 

surprising. The seated poodle has fractured into a pair   

of cottage loaves, a lobster, a dildo, a dumbbell, a doughy   

W lost behind next door’s leylandii. The house on stilts  

 

is a choice. An evacuation drill. The new moon is a lion

– the old, stilled by story-time. The widow’s poem is all   

we have. Lost the swifts, the spring-bringers. We agree  

 

we’ve not heard a cuckoo in years. Driven from home   

by jackdaws: straw thieves, thatch hatchers, tested 

by nesting, she yielded. Elders – we have caring

 

to spare. Unused compassion finds a way –    

lifts the grounded fledgling, invites it to fly.  

 

*

 

Here’s a tourniquet of gut. Medication

expelled. The cure voided. I cried

at the surgery. The doctor’s face round

 

and alarmed. He mimed the actions

for the inhaler as if at a child’s party.

I know a family caught up in the Maui fires,

 

heard of a mother in Vancouver breathing

smoke. The ticks in Denmark are everywhere,

my sister says. We’ll take care crossing the scrub

 

from her summer house to the dunes. Socks,

boots, long trousers, though their thermometer

reads 30°c. My sister says: don’t believe

 

the news about the extremists, Denmark

is very safe. What about the mink? I say.

*

 

Urgent birdsong. The apple tree swells

with fruit and bonhomie. Dove wings whirr.

My bare neck detects only still air, not the chill 

 

of past days. A distant tractor tills Austin’s field.

Soil is dust. Clods atomize, carry over hedges, 

grit my eyes. Sunlight greens the field beyond.

 

Parks & gardens hold key to cooling

overheated cities. Parents tell of shock

as concrete fears force school closures. 

 

Con trail to the west. Feather caught loosely

in a cobweb. A call for papers. The paradox

of ethics: how to write when the house is on fire.

 

Data on losses ticks down: newt, hedgehog, thrush.

The red kite, a smooth-boned silhouette, hovers overhead.    

 

*

 

Our rescue dog, alert for wasps, stares

at the ivy. A blackfly lands on my forearm,

wipes its back legs avariciously. No bees

 

in the grey-grained lavender. A helicopter

bumbles north-north-west. Slow.

Clouds alive as ectoplasm glow behind

 

the neighbour’s gable. I’ve capsized,

head under water, limbs too heavy to wave

in an imitation of swimming. We can drown

 

sitting up. There are pillows, memory foam

that can reshape our dented dreams. There’ll be

a flight on Sunday. In my head storms, banned items.

 

The flight control chaos should be righted by then.

I’m looking forward to wearing my sister’s wool slippers.   

 

*

 

My friend on holiday’s been robbed

in Copenhagen, took the bridge to Malmö

to get over it, get over the Øresund, showed

 

her German passport at the border,

passed through like a molecule, like osmosis.

Here the sun skews panes of light across

 

my woodblock floor. The thermostat clicks.

The hottest-ever month’s turned chilly, steel edge

to this morning’s north-east wind, and the radio says

 

Brunei’s dissuading homosexuality by death

– but only as a deterrent, and the email says

they’ll do a Scandi Noir tour, my friend and her wife,

 

before they cross home to England where the sun’s

going in and the floor’s lost its gold.

 

*

 

Draft from the nozzle overhead. The bridge

below spans Sjælland and Fyn. Cruising home

at 36,000 feet. Pressure in the inner ear.

 

Min fødselsdag. Honey and home knits.

Flat chalk, flint. How forceful must this engine be

to counter the drop? We’re told one passenger

 

has a severe peanut allergy. The North Sea

approaches. Turbulence. What keeps us up?

Rivets, good maintenance, blue metallic paint?

 

Five ships pass beneath, skirt the tiny windfarm.

Too high. Too high for headlines, too propelled

for birdsong, we share this layer with drifting spiders.  

 

Below me, archipelagos. Islands slender as mutant

hatchlings. The white wake of a boat.