108 pages

Published February 2026

Softcover

16.5 x 23.5 cm

ISBN 978-1-0686946-2-2 

A MATTER OF DEGREE

Bucha, Suburban Kyiv           

A naked woman in a fur coat, dead.

Condom wrappers on the floor above.

What happened there − it wasn’t love.

Scant radio news, but in my head

these words kept pressing to be understood

– something to grasp here, if I could.

The condom-users gone, a woman dead.

But why in fur? A pornographic hook?

She wanted it so much she chose this look:

deluxe seduction, high-class come-to-bed.

Is that the fantasy they made her play:

the lustful woman leading men astray?

woman in fur coat condoms dead

One click: The New York Times. She lay,

prone on a blanket, on backyard clay.

A short fur jacket pulled up to her head

conceals her face − her hair spread wide

like a dreaming débutante’s. She died

in the cellar under the garden shed.

Long skid marks on her livid thighs

show she’d been dragged out. I realise

the photographer has given her a shred

of dignity: she’s naked from the waist

but a passing policeman blocks our gaze.

As my small mercy I will leave unsaid

the detail of her extreme exposure

to the men who, as they shot her, posed her

so we’d know she was, to them, degraded.

Then they withdrew. Tower blocks look down

on the wire netting of the chicken run

where Mr Shepitko’s trees spread

their bare branches over his smallholding

and the gloved young man focused on unfolding

a green/pink chevroned cover for a bed

and the policeman stooping by her head

and the old buckets, ash heaps and that shed.

A naked woman in a fur coat, dead.

Those soldiers – they buried themselves in her.

Contempt, I see, is at the root of murder.

I search my conscience, and I count my dead.

Sources: BBC Radio 4, The World At One, 5 April 2022

The New York Times 11 April 2022 ‘Bucha’s Month of Terror’ by Carlotta Gall

CAMPAIGNERS FOR VOTER REGISTRATION, MISSISSIPPI

A crucifixion

but the cross is a threatened man.

A bleeding victim clings to him.

In the foreground another sprawls,

nearly dead, trying to rise.

The painter positions us

face on to them

in the final moment

we could intervene

before the irreversible end.

Night in a stony place.

Flaring torches, from the right,

cast into the frame

only the posse’s shadows

yet we know these men.

Everything in sepia

except the blood.

Worst of all

is that shadow-infiltrated space

which is the last of safety.

The stalwart man, in profile,

looks across that gap

not in heroic self-assertion but

chin down, with the sombre, measuring regard

a mirror offers to appalling times.

Chaney, a Black local,

and Schwerner and Goodman,

New York Jews, beaten and shot;

Chaney castrated;

Goodman buried alive.

The Deputy Sheriff told the Klan,

You’ve struck a blow for the White man …

You've let those agitating outsiders

know where this state stands.

Go home now and forget it.

Those we treat the worst

we loathe the most

because they’ve seen our ugliest of faces.

The unforgiveable sin.

Nothing’s too bad for them.

Source: Murder In Mississippi, a painting by Norman Rockwell in Look magazine, 29 June 1965 to accompany Charles Morgan’s investigative article, Southern Justice about the killing of three civil rights workers in Nashoba County on 21June 1964.

Quotation: attributed to Deputy Sheriff, Cecil Ray Price in Murder in Mississippi, Howard Ball (2004), University Press of Kansas.