White Face, Foreign Hands has won First Prize in the Workplace Racism category of the 2025 Black in White Poetry Competition. Drawn from experiences working in NHS hospitals, it explores racism, exceptionalism, and the lingering legacy of colonialism.
Monument to Scale
A lottery win imagined not as escape, but excess: a colossal Austin Allegro squatting beside a landfill. Monument to scale, bad decisions, and money without meaning: where absurdity hardens into concrete and refuses to move.
Eye of the Painter
A poem shaped inside the storm rather than observed from safety. Taking Turner as witness, it looks at systems under strain—weather, empire, belief—and refuses to make damage decorative. This is about what the world does, not what it claims.
Cost-Benefit
Three functionaries. No windows. No urgency. Cost-Benefit stages a policy meeting where harm is acknowledged, priced, deferred, and minuted away. A poem about how the system shrinks responsibility while failure is carefully diverted elsewhere.
Triage
Pain arrives like live wire and verdict. My body locks, spasms, burns, while advice accumulates: self-manage, be positive, exercise. I pace, growl, and calculate risk, knowing the system calls suffering background noise. Triage becomes character assessment.
ICE
In the shadow of recent ICE operations and shootings in Minneapolis, this poem captures the tension, the pause that haunts everyday movement. Uncertainty becomes its own punishment and always, always the question: who’s next?