after Ocean Vuong i restart this sen tence, i edit edit my life off these fingers these words they ask me how do i do i feel […]
Poems
being just a poem
being just a poem & not a body on the operating table, I never expected you to cut me open & tear me to pieces—never thought you would take your scalpel & carve my abdomen up like the last virgin forest & twist my organs into knots in your quest to cure me (I was […]
Brazil sends army to tackle Amazon Fires (BBC News, 24th August 2019)
Today, I wrote a poem. I let a wasp outside. I made a coffee, set out sugar. When the wasp returned, I gave it sugarwater. I invited you in, changed outfits to make a statement. I made us dinner, made conversation. I suggested a walk. You taught me the words for how sun is filtered by a […]
Raising a Poem-Baby
So, here we are: you, you’re sitting in your highchair, looking all smug. God, you’re so cute that I could just eat you. Right. Here comes the aeroplane? Remember that one? That’s what we’re going to do. See? Mummy’s got the food. Dinner, din dins. Din sure does. You had existed for a handful of […]
My poem sits next to fifteen poems at the workshop table
stares at its feet/ my poem is an orphan/ is a stray kid that went missing from the science class/ doesn’t have a birth certificate/ residence permit/ didn’t grow around books/ or other kids that looked like it/ my poem hid behind the broad shoulders of prose/ it has no permanent postcode/ sounds like three […]
Promise it’ll be my last
we are on the beach and my mother is telling me how poetry isn’t practical anymore. that my writing has to be an act of violence, a way to earn in a world that wants to eat me alive. I am sure that she is right this poem, like those before it, is useless: an […]
be poetic:
1. sit on a clear summer night on the roof of a ford, or an acura, or even a dodge grand caravan. pop open a beer which runs down the sides of the car and puddles into the lush grass. reminisce on how your life overflows the boundaries of summer. 2a. […]
How to Be a Dementia Friend
How-to guides contain illustrations. A guy bent over a chair. You can see his wife in the background wringing her hair. Cursing their choice to not use IKEA. ‘I told you you couldn’t do it!’ How-to guides have multiple rules that end up merging like rivers. Screw A lives next to Screw D, but not […]
how to make dolmeh with your mother
1. drizzle oil onto the pan until the specks of heat feel like the blisters on your mother’s feet after a long day at the cash register greeting customers in a profuse thank you thank you thank you while handing out plastic bags with yellow smiles. 2. saute the rice & ground beef & five-spice […]
ten floridian commandments
i. say ponderosa out loud. it tastes like fresh lemonade and froot loops. ii. multicoloured jellies for breakfast. yellow jello. the american dream. iii. when eating sausages slumped next to your m&m pancakes, remember your father saying: they put something in the food, you know. something that makes them fat and tall. iv. eat cold […]
How To Be Punched
Be punch-worthy Be a boxer Be a punching bag Be someone with a lot of big promises who doesn’t follow through Be with your clumsiest friends at all time Be in a group of actors who do stage fighting Be that person behind someone about to be punched who ducks at the last minute Be […]
How To Write Me, Your Personal Statement
[Intro: why you want to study your chosen subject] Firstly, stop longing / for the figure at the bus stop You have been interested in Love since that girl, I know, but stop & focus on me / for once / don’t linger Your eyes must be blind / to the flutterings / of winged […]
Penning My Thoughts
Take it from a cup, or bag, or maybe from behind your ear. Press down the rounded edge, not the opening. Watch the spring compress then relax, ink building up at the metal tip. Let it fall onto the fall white surface, scrape it across the page, fill the troughs with feeling. There, now you’ve […]
How to be Remembered
It is 20,000 BC, though, of course, you, hardy and paleolithic, do not know it. And you do not wonder how to be remembered. You are, I think, still grappling with phonemes and the complexity of light on water. In thousands of years, your DNA, woven and unraveled countless times in time’s nervous hands, will […]
Baby
I never understood the fingernails as moons depiction, but when you g rabbed my finger suddenly I […]
A poem for a moment with you
Sat in your arms, listening to the sound of you breathing A park bench, a rainy Thursday afternoon Nervous to turn my head to face you, to look into your eyes I don’t want to let myself believe that this moment is real I tell you that this feels like a dream, you laugh But […]
The funeral of half a stranger
It was January, there was no snow, and the sky was baptised in smoky grey. I went to a funeral in my school uniform, in a creased blazer that smelled like pencils and sweat and cheap perfume. I remember that the coffin was flooded with flowers; stars of butter and pearl and blood and hoarfrost. […]
Eating Pringles on the beach, alone
Salt rests on my tongue, my eyes, my ears, the nostril where I got the piercing just so everyone could hate it. The other people on the beach mine the sand for treasures like a parent should for nits in hair. Their bodies combs, their smiles jagged. I sit still. The waves lick me with […]
Moments Like These
Let’s go back to the moments you get four-ish times a year, when you’re laughing and you’re sugar-filled, and suddenly your life has turned from semi-skimmed to full-fat milk, the ones where you wonder how the melodies of worry could survive in this beautiful orchestra of joy and companionship, consciousness sitting behind your laughter-filled ears, […]
Grandma
My heart begs for you To come back to me Oh, how I see you In my dreams Standing in front of me. A smile painted on your face. I see you cooking, The crackle of the oil, The smell, Ah, lovely. Perfect. I walk toward you, To see what magic you’re creating, You swat […]
Warriors
A heartbeat before the cold hits all breath is knocked away. We clutch hands with white knuckles and sharing strength through intertwined fingers we step from warm sand straight into the icicle grasp of a surreally blue unknown. Today we are warriors. We edge deeper into the gently writhing pool that fills the space between […]
Defining Moments
There’s a scar on my arm, preserved by the craters of tiny follicles. The exteriors’ carved jaggedly by the needles that once punctured my veins. Like the probes on the moons surface, they sought for life. I am a world of exploratory discoveries, Yet you are my light. a reflection of you’re appearance, we are […]
mégy egyet kérnék szépen (one more please)
what I want to say is that I met a boy called Bence in a bar on kertész street. in the bar you weren’t able to see a square inch of unpainted wall and I sat there trying to decipher the different flavours on the menu: körte cseresznye szőlő and something that […]
dead language
“How cuneiforms cut by suffering show their harsh unyielding texts impressed on cheeks.” —Requiem, Akhmatova tr. Nancy Anderson “How, O how could I stay silent, how, O how could I keep quiet? My friend whom I love has turned to clay.” —The Epic of Gilgamesh tr. Stephanie Dalley i she can describe this, but not […]
Pacify – If Alun Lewis had a Daughter
Daddy was a pacifist From soft kisses and smooth Soon roughened callouses, Mummy said he never strayed. Knew his pen more than the pistol Brought warm sunlight to those Drowning in mud, in rain. Daddy was a pacifist Mummy said he never raised A single hand; yet his words Survive while his body lies abandoned […]
Tapestry of War
for Miklós Radnóti The child of a textiles man, Your fingers burnt to stitch, To weave your words with threads of gore, From shattered sky to ditch. Your needle scarred the burning flesh, Of Europe’s sickened skin. As white and sheer as jagged bone, As bright and sharp as sin. You tore up strips of […]
this notch of time
after John Jarmain what does it matter now if flowers bloom in the minefields? what does it matter to the unnamed bodies laid in unmapped graves? what does it matter if we take the garlands & crush them? if we pluck the leaves out one by one like soldiers picked off in battle? if we […]
vergissmeinnicht
your name became a dandelion clock haemorrhaging time. seeds in my teeth I spit out centuries, let them blossom in cracked concrete. this is what it means to bleed, to burst into flower / explode colour, the way a poppy seed knows it will one day be red. torn from sleep. each wish […]
Alluvion
I dream up an excess of horses. That night on the beach, an ear carves open the ocean’s avian, elides this dull stampede. Waterlogged, the mare sinks her trampled neck into atonal static: pith, to make love/to ash. Someday, you kneel, brook your hand through the deluge. The water parses […]
Cambridge 1941
We have blackout here Just like we did at home. Curtained windows, no smoke. When the fire’s out and the curtains closed We all clamber up in the slow dusk— George, Mother and me— to watch, From the stone roof All the lights switch off. This new city turned to grey. If I squint, here […]
Gold Beach
after Keith Douglas The landers spat us to the sand like seeds, and the Germans – secure in concrete barrows – watched an army grow towards them. When shells hit, I saw limbs attached to nothing but the memory of movement. We walked on whatever was underfoot. Soon we were flame through red phosphorus, consuming […]
Aria for the Dead Ones
Berlin A soldier, impressionist as he dies. Then he’s perpendicular to death: a simple rosebud in the hair of a painted daughter who will die later that night. In the backdrop, the moon galloping like a prayer might—feral horse, immortal patch of sky in its wake. Though most aren’t queer, I watch the soldiers […]
speak out
i am going to speak out. i am going to fight. i will not stay silent. you think that just because i am frightened i will shut my mouth? my fear makes me burn brighter my entire being has been doused in the very gasoline that you sell my future out for you think that […]
A Morning Person
What a beautiful day for a wedding! It was raining when we buried my mum, she loved lilacs and here they are, the lilac lilacs like pendulous large breasts dripping with dew, I am enjoying them alone with my mug of coffee, which I also enjoy with the intensity of a remark made in a […]
Blakeney, moonlight
When the timpani, when the violins, mine is one body among many prone in the gallery. Still as seals on a wet beach in moonlight, waves of sound lap at the exposed summer night. We enter the music as we enter a sea, wishing to be transformed in some small, elemental way, eyes-closed-drifting through all […]
They Came From Somewhere Else
The Mask
i.m. Major Brodie ***, MC, DSO, 1882 – 1923 You must have discovered it early. Perhaps you felt your heart unfold, your breath quicken, when the men stripped off their shirts at harvest, and guilt was a sudden aftertaste. You put the mask on, like we all did, fearing the truth of nakedness. You learnt […]
Sloes
We’ve left sloe-picking late. Now white yeast clouds the surface of their bruised moons. I wasn’t there when she needed me; a difficult birth, that led her to the edge. And now she rolls her eyes as my clumsy hands knock and scatter sloes onto the grass, and when we have filled each stale box […]
On Draining the St Martin Canal
I had thought that I preferred its placid waters that trade a Lethe forgetfulness for our reflections in soft focus, encourage a belief in the metaphysical, a fantasy of fish dancing beneath sun-speckled mirrorballs to the Gauloises wheeze of an accordion; but when they drained the St Martin Canal, what they found, along with the […]
The second lie
Start by telling them about that night I was lost, adrift, a skinny ghost tripping through Shinjuku’s dirty streets, hob-nobbing with yakuza, dizzy on shochu, face shiny in the city’s thick wet heat. Or that morning my legs dangled free from the helicopter door, Vietnam’s canopy flattening like moss beneath my feet; cold hands toying […]
On reading Professor McGrath
‘We must be prepared to be surprised at those whom we meet in the kingdom of God.’* They made him smile at first, those hope-laced words which appear to dent predestination, intoxicant as gaudy hummingbirds in hovered flight. McGrath’s bold suggestion hints salvation might be for one and all, not the preserve of a self-selecting […]
Being Swedish in Pontlottyn Rugby Club
Word goes around: Maria’s friend is Swedish. Boys in stripy tops line up across the dance floor curious to know if my life is all sex and cigarettes. They tie themselves in knots to get close to me. I make space between my lips to let out the nonsense of pretend Swedish. I tell them […]
The Dub Artist
I’ve been learning about dub-engineers and the tricks they play: marrying up their own footsteps to the character’s gait; slamming the studio door at just the right moment; rustling leaves in synchronicity with the screen. They replace those little things lost beneath dialogue or tense music or laughter. Some things don’t sound like themselves, and […]
Sp/lit
Whitewash
Cyprien told me in confidence, and I promised his secret was safe. I remember the bar, the tarnished walls, the termites sucking the whitewash, their exuberant, tenacious persistence upturning the earth underneath. We were sucking Fanta through straws. He was the one neighbour I knew didn’t drink. He leaned forward to utter the words. I […]
Home County
There is a village coiled in the Chilterns, all catflaps and thatch, black beams and whitewash, cradled in hills and cosseted by trees where bellringers reel out handstroke and backstroke the way the red kites loop the sky while we walk the dog or jog round the park. But stay awhile and it’s not so […]
When Ursula Tyrwhitt was Gladstone’s Lover
Dear Gwen, Today’s vase holds mustard-yellow chrysanthemums, yesterday’s were rainbow-paper anemones. This evening we spoke about the economy, I hold our balance in orchid asymmetry. His hands, after a day deep in stately missions, turn our passion, the blue-deep of delphiniums. He scribes such love scenes I’m losing my faculties, his ink, tattooed on my […]
Appointments
Contains strong language. The first doctor insists that my relationship with food is to my self what a seed is to a fruit, that my eating habits are the moon and all my life’s catastrophes are the tide. The second doctor makes a diagnosis I can’t pronounce. My father tells me I will fuck up […]
Maple
They named me after a sweet tree As if to hide my spirit They named me after a gentle tree As if to hide my strength They named me after a small tree As if I would not grow They named me after an old tree As if I was not young They named me […]
Phlegethon
When she’s sat in the dark I light myself like a candle Burn away the shadows Til she’s sitting in the sunshine The only problem with candles Is that in order to glow They must burn themselves away But when she’s sat in the dark I swear, It takes everything in me Not to set […]
The Drowning of Li Po
And Li Po also died drunk. He tried to embrace a moon In the Yellow River. – Ezra Pound, ‘Epitaphs’ the river is drunk; reeling, it tosses the sad poet’s prow to the white moon which bathes gently in the dark water of heaven. the moon, enraged by this sot’s trespass, casts his prow […]
I want to stand naked in the school hall
on the podium, mid assembly, so my presence will be so overbearing no one can look away. I want their eyes to burn into my skin, examine its ripples and folds and the scar that digs it up like a trench in Ypres. I’d watch a few hundred jaws slowly unhinge, drop down into a […]
Zeyde
eyns My grandfather sat at the foot of my bed At six years old, my tongue bumbled over my anglicized versions of the Yiddish that he tried to teach me He was six when he learned his second tongue and I can barely see the first now I fell asleep to it tsvey My grandmother […]
my mother, with eight chemo sessions to go
there’s a green chair that sits in my living room. i’m pretty sure that it stands taller and older than me; for years it’s housed the bodies of my family and friends and it still smells like the wet fur of our first dog. i’ve never felt more ashamed than when sitting on the chair […]
Clocks
our clocks forgot to go back this year or maybe their hands have become stubborn in old age, so we live an hour ahead now, flowers drooping before their petals fall plates dropping when the guests have not yet arrived when I sit on bridges and watch water sleep walk, the people on boats are […]
what are we before we are mothers
woman wants to loop herself like a spool of thread into the cupped arms of a mug woman wants to use up all her thoughts considering the brown heart of coffee woman wants a man with a beard and a dog to lift a mug to his winded lips and swallow her chapped laughter woman […]
Explaining Memes to Keats
“So you see,” I say slowly, “It’s a little engine of remembering, recalling, reverberating in the mind, like rhyme.” “So, it can never die?” he replies. I avert my eyes. “It will, with time.”
the opioid diaries
snooze hit snooze again wake up pull on some dirty clothes run to the bathroom prep a shot cold shower shrapnel digging into flesh later dry hair wringing out dregs of the banal then abyssopelagic ecstasy when i feel like that i often feel what i feel * inventory: 70 mg valium […]
Love Poem to Myself
after Jack Underwood your hair continues to surprise me in its texture after every single wash / like the shock of a photocopier lid realising the other side when it beams white light / I could listen to you listing your banned foods for days / and tell you bad jokes about music as the […]
You’re Not Black
I sit with them at lunch Fried chicken on my plate I eat with a knife and fork “You’re not black, if you don’t use your hands to eat” Yet I know that hands tied up the strange fruit on the trees in the south The fruit for the crows to pluck For the rain […]
Meritocracy
And you, you will be sat there surrounded by crackling, yellowed pages with a wad of fifties stuffed in your mouth. And me, I’ll be sat here all picturesque, swathed in marble carvings and oil paintings older than my childhood home. And I’ll silently seethe, let the blood bubble out of my tear ducts, let […]
A Word of Advice
Stop falling in love with people you could write poems about. Stop tripping over and drowning yourself in metaphors And obsessing over similes Like your silly white shirt is clouding your judgement. Resist those with whom you can be Radcliffian, Fall in love with no one in any way Byronic, Or those who may resemble, […]
Regarding Anne Sexton
About the cigarette hammered between your fingers. Does it nail you to the world? I imagine you never puff where inhalations are available, that you’re always running out of matches. The problem with this photo is, you’re doing that look like a thousand grainy poets before and after you. Eyes left. Like you have just […]
The Terminal 1 Smoking Lounge
Funny, how midlife crises start in smoking lounges. You look done (God’s sake, you’ve no make-up on) holding your forty-year lungs up, a flag of tar. And who’d think, with all the life and bustle outside, you’d flee into a glass coffin, willingly, for peace? But you’re met with an ashtray vaudeville as Rodrigo y […]
In Which a Middle-Aged Woman in Primark Jeans Denies Her Invisibility
to be read in a breathless rush Can that be me, mon dieu, c’est pas vrai, in the LBD (c’est le dernier cri) that I’ve always craved, grazing slim knees and oh! slim legs, oh yes this vitrine is loving me – is that a fascinator I spy, rakish angle, speckled veil trailing over one […]
The Whole Tooth
Of the various evolutionary explanations of the tooth, I side with fish scales. It is a short swim from a defensive attribute to an offensive one. The tooth is composed of hard, durable material. It is often our last enduring remnant. In this way the tooth of certain persons has become famous. Although it has, […]
To Sugarcoat the Truth
“Is it easier to be good or bad?” my son inquires as the snow falls outside & covers the chilled body in its bed of autumn leaves. As a father, I’ve tried not to sugarcoat the truth, even if it speaks of genocide, of disasters magnified by humans. So the snowdrift is […]
Tamponade
our hearts on a heavy chain fastened to a faithful rib – Vasko Popa Still and light she lies, all eight years of her, her lips stained blue, as though she’s feasted on summer berries. And when the pressure falls inside her lungs, it builds in the powered bellows breathing into her. And when you […]
Talking to my Therapist about Climate Anxiety
So we sit, as we do every Tuesday, in chairs that are somehow too deep, with the six feet of professional distance spread out on the rug before us. How was your week? Not great – I wring my hands – not great I am not working as hard as I could be and my […]
Like Father
started 2000, finished 2019 for W.C., who encouraged me to finish what I’d started My daddy was Irish and famous – “Well, sort of Irish and sort of famous,” he said – and told the truth. He loved and he was loved, and was a joker, and in his youth he’d passed the eleven-plus […]
Nocturne for a Moving Train
The trees I’ve glimpsed from the window of a night train were the saddest trees. They seemed about to speak, then – vanished like soldiers. The hostesses handed out starched linens for sleep. Passengers bent over small icons of sandwiches. In a tall glass, a spoon mixed sugar into coffee banging its silver face against […]
Group Portrait at the Stopover
The National (UAE) reported that the Philippines’ top export is “its people”. The Guardian (UK) reported that the Philippines provides the third highest number of National Health Service staff overall. take a walk / over the sharp stones / then come back – Pablo Neruda i. Elbow to elbow on waiting chairs. We rummage through […]
Contingency
If you dig a hole and get in it, what then? If you, say, flick a tree and holler, then what? If you reverse into an attitude of dotty surrender, all flags flying, the sky as blue as an unblown whistle, the children dancing, well what’s next […]
Sacred and Profane
This poet once told me, poetry is pure. You have to approach words with the fear of God the way you hold an ancient Torah scroll found in an archaeological dig. And underground, in the trenches of meaning, poets engrave letter by letter in a tablet like idol worshippers in the name of the holiest […]
St Lucy’s Day
for JH We are half way through the dark time. They know it in their roots, the winter trees: What am I working at, an old poet, sitting over the keys? Today, I caught a glimpse of my face in a photograph and made out pathos in the lines of my mouth […]
Cambridge 1949
Look, how she teeters in a tight skirt on high heels over the cobbled street, past Heffers’ gabled windows and knobbly glass, the music of wartime dance bands still inside her – what does she know of madrigals and choirs, my adolescent self, in her first term? She dreams of Soho clubs and Raymond Chandler. […]
Poyekhali! (Let’s Go!)
Vostok 1 is Yuri’s little lunchbox, his spacesuit a scrunched-up smidge of tinfoil. Lid on tight, he is a happy crumb of a human being tumbling about, so forward rolls look easy up here. Just outside, the giant cheese-moon is full and smiling, and has picked Yuri first for her team. […]
St Petersburg
A murder of crows, caw, caw, caw startle from the trees, a bad ilk the sky pale, blue, raw. A sad black and white score darkened rooms, faces pale as milk the closed mortuary door. The coffins lined with silk the empty square, down with the Tsar we carry our dead on catafalques, the […]
The River
We slide through the brown gut of a river in a sticks-and-bones boat, plugging gaps with hair, strips of her shirt, chewed leaf. Frilled stars line up like milk teeth. She reads them, tells me monkey and pig always clash. I say, no, I am like you. I tell her how we will both become […]
one man band (gagarin plays the saxophone)
gagarin plays the saxophone, and his sigh propels the moon up into the air, tumbling skywards. gagarin plays the electric guitar, and stars bounce between the frets: tiny atomic ricochets making waves. gagarin plays the drums, and each offbeat is a sonic boom, filling the black hole with snares and cymbals. gagarin plays the fool, […]
bohemia
engraved earth, snug against the coursing flow its pattern endures through shine and snow woven through the grassland, scarcely letting go serpentine, carving the land curved and creased like the palm of a hand whittling trees and roads and sand breathing, brimming with vitality and the lifeblood yet liberating itself with an unfettered flood from […]
Muse
I. Night clings to her like some beauty, dew to a petal; others near and draw away, allured by her melancholic magnetism. Her bitter breath frosts their pallid frames II. emerging from dawn, subtle as a silver cat leaping rooftops, slinking from the slumbering streets. A Tipsy tune coaxes distant memory from the cobbles, the […]
Today
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Nadia Lines I go to a museum today and say hello to the light living there – what is gone, and imagine what I can let live on. I read a book today to remember an experience that I cannot understand and cannot have, to dredge up poetry. I paint […]
Today
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Aldwin Li Today I will go to a museum. I will greet its colours, both light and dark – I will wish its past well; welcome my future. Today I will read a book and recall little things, life, the lives of men – and call them to me; craft […]
According to Google Translate
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Olivia Todd The inspiration to use Google Translate comes from my secondary school Spanish teacher Miss Qureshi, who always warned us against using it. Today I am going to go to a museum to go to work; greet those living things there, light and shine. To forget the past and […]
today
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Beth Bayliss today my task is to go to a museum; to meet the colours that call it home, to greet the lights and the shadows: to forget the past and to dream of the future. today my task is to read a book; to recall an everyday quality of […]
Today I’ll sit in the museum
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by William Snelling Today I’ll sit in the museum to greet the gold-fringed things, the ancient masks in lit-up glass, to leave behind these drab habits and salvage some new light. Today I’ll sit between the pages that speak the street din and its pale dreams. Then I’ll write a poem […]
danse des vivants
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Daniel Baksi i roll down piccadilly to see Franz Kline capturing a room with his alphabet of black and white – i breathe through the bodies and chiaroscuro of it. to mayfair library, where the woman at the counter recommends me Àgua Viva. the spine harbours a resin of blood […]
Today
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Isabella Jiang Today my work is found in the depths of a museum—to greet the shadows, the many suns & hues within: to sweep the past aside, as sooted hair, & let the fancies pierce to the fore. Today my work is to read a book—to turn […]
I Saw
A translation of ‘Այսօր’ (‘Aysor’) by Lola Koundakjian, tr. Ellora Sutton Today I will go to a museum and embrace all the colours in the walls, the genius, the chiaroscuro. Gorge on the long spectrum of yesterdays, grow fat with the impossible embryo of tomorrow. Today I will read a book, break bread with dust, […]
Today I am
by Lola Koundakjian, translated by Maia Brown Today I am a gallery; my walls breathing colour, inviting ideas from the shadows into the visiting light of the present. Today I am a book, worlds recalled between my pages; lives exchanged and invigorated, crafting the everyday anew. Today I am a page of paper; paint teasing […]
Heading home, dusk
Heading home, dusk, in the park the homeless chew their apples. In the bright, big, empty bank lights flicker on the plastic Christmas tree. A dark window catches her image and she steps out of this tight frame. Who emerges? She stops. She always stops here, she wants to know. Perhaps now it will make […]
Two Photographs
In the older photograph my eyes are two frowning pockets, and my chest only housed knots and clauses. I used fast shutter speeds to capture photographs before sadness spilled into the frame. I was never one to track progress, but today I did. Before taking that selfie, I bent the sun toward my face and […]
Aspeciation
I am the first of a new genus. I say to the insulating skin. I say to the motor of the feet. I say to the dent in the femur. I say to the alloys of the alleles. I say to the polished gleam of the bicep. I say to the rusting of the curtseying […]
Bothered
I am very bothered when I remember all the terrible things I have heard. Especially when we are told the world is changing. If I am disgusted at the stories steeped in pain and left to brew in misery what do the victims feel? When their leggings/ skirts/ shorts are held under the weight of […]
More Than Organised Dust
All women are more than organised dust. During those silent hours, my mind sailed. Put faith in the ones you know you can trust. My desire to learn was seen as lust. Eve set the world spinning for us — God failed. All women are more than organised dust. In Newington Green, I did what […]
On the Skagerrak Sea, with child
“It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy & sorrow, should only be organised dust … sometimes, when the sea was calm, I was amused by disturbing young star fish which floated just below the surface.” – Mary Wollstonecraft In the waves […]
Bones
“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Bones bones bones, Hanging from my lips are bones. Seeing bones, feeling bones, Hips, ribs and hidden bones, A ribbed cage. I wrap tinsel […]
Origins
My reputation died with me, so what? Decay is a wonderful smith. Bury a body of flesh or work, its skeleton slips through the fervid rot, awaiting a curious eye. Take these bare bones, do you see? I was the first of our genus, the squat fish to your swallow; dragging myself to new ground, […]
To my baby
“It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Sweet girl, Don’t give too much, for people don’t always keep their promises, but love them anyway.