That vision of you standing in the snow was my secret talisman, a lucky charm to ward off bad weather, frosted lips and crunch hips. This time, dumbstruck by seasonal variations, I’m moving slowly along a gigantic wedge, following my own reversed footprints in the hope of getting home before dark. That monkey, sitting on…

Alligators crawl through the slippered streets, punctuating the monks’ marches for alms. Bathed in a tropical punch glow, the women wash green vegetables in the shallows by the wharf. Cradled in her mother’s arms, a moon baby peeks out from her blanket of snow with cinnamon eyes. Deaf boys run shouting through the markets, each…

It’s just been built but already you can see the tyre-marks on the roundabouts, the skidding tales of midnight smashes and the crumbs of shattered glass. City without a history, merely a pamphlet, that used to be handed out at the now-closed tourist information centre. The letters of its name have been stickered crookedly onto…

Once upon a time there was a piece of paper through which the words printed on the other side could not be seen, a piece of paper so thick it might have been made of wood. Twice upon a time there was a transparent screen through which one could see the other side of the…

City that encloses many other cities, like a lunch pail filled with multiple containers, each of which holds a prescribed number of foodstuffs – nuts, sultanas, rice, meatstuffs, tapioca, croutons, larvae. An anticity formed from invisible matter, shifting its colours and contours, blown by desert winds and dream tornadoes. An atrocity filled with horrors, spikes…

The city is tiny but it takes up so much space. In the tunnels, on the wagons and under the stars. One more push and then the darkness will cloak us, or crack. Dreams of a black crow with a blade of grass in its beak. City of wondrous walls and far-up windows, through which…

City of dread, of shanties and loam. In a police state jacked on lonely clubs and bullet time, some streetwalkers trip the line, busting the bleeding hearts and painting skyscrapers red. The tenements by the disused stream are no longer reliably dangerous. Shadows swoop on crumbs of maize and shoot arrows into corporate plans but…