Content warning: grief

Content warning: rape

this is the moment skeletons became atheists. gold lodged in the back of throats and stuck, rigor mortis like you never had a chance. and maybe the soup tastes like corpses, or maybe the soup tastes like god. or like angels, and cracks in the barbed wire. because skeleton is a synonym for survivor, in […]

                                The sky reddening like an unbruised body—           and you,          gone for days now, calcified in this unshed nightmare where the tiger           is closing its teeth over your wrist again,                    dozens of rabbit carcasses littering the halls again,                    tiger slipping quiet through the nights, […]

Somewhere out there is a statue of me where my face isn’t as long, my sadness shorter. I meet with her head-on. I tell her to turn in the direction of the power ballads and the attractive folks that sing them. I’ve just seen a face, says Paul McCartney in the middle of 1965, and […]

Halfway through the horror movie, the lights give out, the whole city held under a blanket. Turning the other cheek. Some phantom hand finds mine. I will learn to love you softly is what the house would say, its belly emitting a quiet dust rumble, drops in the kitchen sink like fingers drumming a wooden […]

I The mini liberators of women, hoisting those hems to the Heavens, giving their legs room to breathe. II The silver capped scholars, keeping those iridescent specimens in place for little curious eyes. III The diligent sewers’ stabilisers, holding together linen squares so they can stitch their designs to life. IV The silent supporters, presenting […]

Body    lies on the bottom step. How did it get there? we ask.  Body    is bloody. Hair matted. Nails dirty.  Body    ’s hand falls near the light. We are glad Body    has made no mess. Clean fall. No Body    would notice. What should we do? Body    says rug. Wrap me […]

Joan of Arc and I lay head-to-head in the wash of a meadow frothing Queen Anne’s lace like a corrupted lung. Her fingers dabbling my palms like water, that martyr and I speak of our own voices: mine, stolen; hers given like a sack of entrails. Did the voices twitch, I ask, did they wriggle […]

For Wilfred Owen Contains strong language our bodies ache    on the streets where we rattle plastic cans for change    we watch the flocks of low drooping eyes scuttle by    like brambles in the north wind we have become part of the scene    patient    hopeful    crying out         but nothing happens on the corner a preacher […]

I saw Humphrey Bogart in a train station, Crewe, three o’clock in the morning, and he looked as faded and grey as I felt stumbling half asleep off the late service.   When I was ushered out the doors, he was just there by the taxi rank, leant up on a pillar, smoking, lit up […]

You may know Jesus. That preacher/teacher/healer/magic man with the clear silt skin. You may have seen him around town, raising the dead and making friends. Maybe he cleaned up your acne, maybe he showed you the gold humming of God. Take a look at his Tumblr: @carpentryqween. 1/? Jesus is a rebel leader/activist/socialist/pacifist and last […]

“Do you not know I am a woman?”(Act III, scene ii, As You Like It) My lover and I no longer speak. We leave notes in the mist on one another’s eyes. Once, he carried me through fields of sheep when I began to doubt that softness could be born. My lover doesn’t see the […]

                 Delhi, 2020 Delhi today is like a dried-out battleground / after one final revolution. Sentries in khaki thrash / young men on peculiar vehicles / for something I don’t understand. I hide my sewed-up face / in dark alleys; people look at me from the other side of their windows / scared. I’d have […]

Show me your teeth, God. Tonight, at the Apple Store under the unshut moon. Visit me tonight, God. Fog this spirit mirror with your Word — blind me with this new handheld eclipse. Oh, but my head sings with standing so long as the marrow of this sun-bleached bone. Church as mirage. Along its aisles […]

Ferenc II Rákóczi was a Hungarian aristocrat who led rebellions against the Habsburg empire in the early 18th century. He is widely considered a national hero in Hungary.”Rákóczi” is also the name of a popular Hungarian breakfast salami. Dear, kind Ferenc: I am in love with your meat-printed face. I fan this last pious slice, […]

Based on the legend of Chang’e Winter: the living room gleaned of moonlight. A city slumped anemic over its knees, milky and putrid like a wound unsutured. I used to scrape rust from kitchen counters and drink fat until my tongue swelled gibbous, large enough to swallow the November sky and your rice fields gone […]

is thinking of you at those just-teenage get togethers at Rebecca’s, hoping to feel grown but betraying your youth by gripping your glammed-up fruit shoot too tightly. Dionysus creating Strongbow Dark Fruit (and the Aldi knock-off too) is thinking of you at family BBQs, where you are fourteen and disgusting and need something to do […]

And I never saw my mother again. All my stars fell palms-first into the thorns outside my small glassless window. No door, no stairs. I just found myself, there. My thimble. My long smoking rifle and I, the smoke softly ceasing to exist. It takes seventy years to wash my hair. She did it in […]

Şahmaran tells me behind her bar, don’t trust a man if you have to tell him but you have sisters and a mother, too. don’t trust them if they think clearing the table is a compromise don’t trust the family father who thinks his sons rather fear him             don’t trust the boy who pulls your […]

Don’t let your widowed father remarry—              that is, if you still want to wake up at dawn to the sound of your heart beating between              your ribs. Remember: stepmothers are evil and vain and bloodthirsty and own talking              magic mirrors capable of making calculated analyses of your beauty. Remember: all              that […]

A boy: small thighs, coat aged into feathers, walks in through the cold. Undressing his wet clothes I find breadcrumbs in the folds of skin. He unwinds the limbs of an apple. Milk slips from his childish lilt. I weep as he sucks the glass like an orphan. I bring him my blankets and I […]

after Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife My boy went down to the river and came back bronzed man. Sneer frozen on his handsome face, eyes unblinking, tongue of gold, contempt held Sharp (between his iron cavities). We were unlike. He’d twisted his heart into alloy pockets as cold as the river in the winter-time. […]

He feels like he could eat the world raw. I feel like our happy ending is another broken promise. like the sun will set when he does, when the roar of his name across battlefields is not enough; it never was I feel like his hair will never look the way it does now. like […]

is empty      of children, ripped cardboard,  happy endings. A flesh      rimmed cavern, sinews strung under the heart like harp strings. Tanks      rumble under my feet when the wolf talks, gutter-pulsing      in skin. I lie on my back & pretend this hollow is a spaceship,       primed for a red sky. The acid  river foams down my […]

Contains adult themes Medusa died this year. Didn’t you hear? You can’t turn men to stone If they never look at you. Come on, She said, My eyes are up here! Medusa cut her hair short, Squeezed into yoga pants And filed her fangs The Thursday night Before it happened Because she’d read an article […]