Mona Arshi's Small Hands (Liverpool University Press, 2015)

Some favourite passages:



     He starts undressing me under the sweetening stars.

Please girl, he mews; this might be the last time
     I will see how the thin light enters you.

end of "The Lion"

I want to tell you about the elegant savagery of my spider.

from "Practising Your Skills"

She smells of . . . preening oil, salt, top notes of earth.

My mother is turning bird.

from "The Bird"

Brave things are happening

            in the garden when I'm not looking.

The junction of each branch

                            holds its sobriety.

opening of "April"

Wait fast ghost, you should see how the living room is

choked with living things and your mother is upstairs

sitting on your bed, nurturing scraps in the poor light.

last section of "Notes Towards an Elegy"

I traced a stitch raised by your absence.

     I concentrated on this panel of sky

and wound myself into a ribbon of silence.

opening stanza of "The Rain That Began Elsewhere"

Fat drops of rain

captured

in your tiny pink purses.

from "Ode to a Pomegranate"

                                      I contemplate window glass,

quietly fracturing on its own terms.

end of "Woman at Window"

Purchase Small Hands directly from the publisher here.