As the blood runs down his playboy face

Traffic gridlocks on the BR-116 into São Paulo 

and a burger box flies out of a passenger window.

Two wood pigeons cool in the concrete shade

of a brutalist carpark.

An Italian waiter in Soho writes his phone number 

on a bill, flourishing the crossbar on his continental 7’s. 

A girl building a sandcastle on the beach near Cadiz 

starts a conversation with a crab about paradise.

A boy’s foot slips on the orange clay of a cobalt pit 

at an unknown location in the DRC. 

Adulterers slide between sheets and the law 

in a cheap Jakarta motel with no air conditioning.

Four fingers shape a chord that floats over a reservoir

in memory of a brother lost to losing.

A pale acanthus shoots pollen into the blazing sky.

As the blood runs down his playboy face, 

the candidate yells at the camera: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ 

First published in The Madrid Review