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from <em>Ars Poetica</em>

Greg Harrison, Arcadia or By the Light of the Clubhouse 2025. Courtesy of the artist, via Keeper.

Os Sacrum

HEAT Series 3 Number 20
July 2025

I’d rushed out onto the iced-over top step of a brutalist block of university flats and felt my feet skid out from under me. I’d pitched almost horizontally onto a cold concrete edge four steps below, cracking the full plummeting weight of my being square onto my lower back. When I picked myself up and limped into the university clinic, the doctor marvelled at the fact that no matter how violent the accident, the bone upon which I had fallen – the os sacrum – was the one bone that refused to break.

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The Marguerite Flower

HEAT 5
1997
Fish can all turn and flit in absolute synchrony, iron filings will point to the pole, well we’re all arranged like that in a focus on the door, something has signalled to the herd that this is what we will do and we do it, we do not move even though the rain begins again and satins darken, shirts cling and faces mercifully run rivulets.
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Things That Disappear

HEAT Series 3 Number 5
October 2022
The farewells are what I remember. How thin and white R. looked beneath his shock of hair when I said goodbye to him for the last time and he nodded to me without lifting his head from the pillow, just briefly closing his eyes. How I didn’t go back to his bed, but simply closed the door behind me. The next day I had to pick up his things from the hospital, including the razor I’d charged for him the day before. The razor was charged, but R. was dead.
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Animal Poems

HEAT Series 3 Number 8
April 2023
The Leech / You’re a sycophant, repugnant. Vile bacchant— / you suck and glut, fill like a slimy phial. No denial / of the claret in our veins. Fat phlebotomist, / yes, you were used to treat ailments—fevers, gout, / haemorrhoids, headaches, clots, bleeding wounds / and gums—you thrived, made doctors rich.
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Three Poems

HEAT Series 3 Number 14
May 2024
8) he followed me on Instagram, I followed him back / just to be kind, and he introduced himself as a physicist / building a time machine and asked if I / was interested to go back to the precolonial Tapanuli / because he had the white man’s guilt, / the Dutch person’s guilt, the coloniser’s guilt, / but also the urge / to verify if my ancestors were really man-eaters, / ‘Aren’t you at least a bit, teeny, tiny, curious?’ / he replied, ending it with a chicken leg emoji
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The First Minute After Midnight

HEAT 11
1999
Through all the months of chemotherapy, what Rachel focussed on was reclaiming herself. Her hair came off in soft and strangely frightening clumps in the shower as if it had no anchor. Nothing whatsoever kept it where it was supposed to be, where it had always been. Her hair said more clearly than anything else that Rachel’s world had come unhinged, that her own personal physics had cut loose and was headed for parts unknown.
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On ‘Claiming the Colossus’ by Evelyn Juers

HEAT 2
1996
This is an essay about the gigantic – women who seem permanently pitched skyward, whose articulations overpower, and have the capacity to rupture and then obliterate. It’s about the enormity and hot terror of self-expression, where words do not formulate slowly in mouths but instead ‘leap from lips’. This isn’t the stuff of sensible ambition – it’s loftiness and extravagance and total grandeur!
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Mourning a Breast

HEAT Series 3 Number 8
April 2023
The pitter-patter of falling water echoed in my ears, as though I could hear the squelching of soap on women’s skin. Supple flesh, water, the sweet scent of soap. When could I go swimming again? I didn’t know. I had no way of guessing, understanding, exploring, or predicting my fate. My mind swam with question marks, the answer to all of these questions the three words ‘I don’t know.’
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