The body is your genesis. You gesture to the earth
In rivalry and revelry, unravelling the sky.
Strong hands will strip the flesh in preparation of rebirth;
The chisel and the brush reforge the outlines of your dreams -
The skin touched by the glow of stars, the seams of mouth and eye,
Primordial and delicate, a being of extremes.

Each day the truth will ebb and flow, a bridge over the sea.
You picture it; it’s golden. Change resides across the sound,
Identity in constant flux with what it means to be
An artist and a form of art, as if you just begun
To recognise the systems that have wrapped themselves around
Your wrists, like rays of light in conversation with the sun.

Among the many, you are one, but you are not alone.
Creating worlds anew, you miss the soil beneath your feet:
The way the water whispers to the solitary stone,
The way a body yields, in symbiosis with the soul.
Come home and see your planet. See the people on the street
United in adversity to grasp your common goal.

This is a revolution! We revolve and so define
Our sunrises and sunsets: where our stories start and end.
We wield the pen, the knife, the choice to stay and draw the line.
Accepting all that moves, denying all that longs to force
The limits of our agency, the voices we defend.
Our work is bright and resonant. Light blazes at its source.

The candour of reality, framed by fractions of a second - that’s what photography is about.

You have to capture something dreadfully beautiful, like the movement of a soaring gull, or the laughter of a child, or the sunlight dancing on the sea. You have to put it in a cage, and hope to God it stays alive.

On the first day of spring, I had inherited an ancient film camera from my grandfather.

On the second day of spring, I found myself crying in one of the parks at the centre of my city. I was to hunt true and lovely things with a lens and a shutter, but there’s only so much blistering joy our human hearts can take before they overflow with emotion, shattering the dutiful bars of our ribs.

When I was a young teenager, my friend’s mother told me about the way she was overcome with the piercing tears of renewed religion as she looked at a leaf quivering in the wind. Her trembling faith restored in an instant by its bright and slender shape.

For me, it was the camellia blossoms that day - all so perfect and significant. It was the significance that astounded me more than the perfection - each flower was a tangible microcosm, open to the immortal mythology of the change of the seasons. Red and radiant, the camellia blossoms spoke in a multiplicity of distinct voices, melting into a sanguine unison.

They said, “Look! I’m alive! We’re alive! You’re alive!”

I felt like this statue of a boy in my old hometown, his arms outstretched with palms open to the sky, head tilted back in ecstasy, eyes open too, breath turning to ether.

God, I was alive!

The human mind is sort of like an ancient film camera inherited from our ancestors. I mean that our memories distil events to singularities. I recall snapshots, flashbacks. In those photographs, my mother is not a good person.

My mother has done terrible things that have shaped and changed who I am, but I won’t deny her that personhood. Some people do bad things, after all. I’ve done bad things myself, in the formless shape of my mother.

If a bad person sees me being good and alive, then maybe, they will change, overcome with the weightless happiness of a bronze boy.

After seeing the sun set on the second day of spring, my father asked me if he could show a poem I wrote to my mother. I listened to the polyphonic whispers from the camellias.

I listened to the boy within, challenging the spray of the sea to lay its claim to me, but the waves were still as the water swallowed up the sun.

I still don’t know if it was hope or hatred in my heart, but God, I was alive enough to say yes!

I will shape and change her. I will show her what it means to step outside the frame.

On the third day of spring, I met an old man trying to catch fish. He was sitting by the side of a pond with a fishing rod propped up, but nothing was biting. He didn’t seem to be at all upset, enjoying the warmth of the sun trickling down the bare and budding branches.

We spoke, and I told him about my ancient film camera. He asked about my accent, which is what people always ask, but I didn’t mind telling him my birthplace and heritage.

He told me that the number of fish he’s caught over the years was countable on one hand, and that he always released them. Carp can live for over 45 years, after all - he’d be cutting that life short for no reason.

I hoped with all my heart, ribcage straining, that he would catch one, and that it would remember him for a long time.

I asked to take a photo of him, but he begged me to not waste my film. Still, I was selfish, and insisted on one picture, because I knew I would probably never see him again.

I may not ever see my mother again, not in person. She lives in the same town as the bronze boy, a town I ran from. She makes me so aware of loss, of the mind’s fragility, of the way all my images of her flutter to the floor and die. I never know which memories I make will be significant enough to persist, so I cheat - my ancient film camera will let me carry them all.

After the old man’s portrait, I took some photos of buttercups flourishing through muddy grass. On the developed pictures returned to me, the flowers seemed to glow against the green, distorted into a golden aura.

I hope to God I’ll stay alive.

the above piece is an edit of "flowers, fish, film, family". you can read the original here. it's the time week, april 1st.

I am tired of telling the story of the great god who died like a sun,
Like a daughter denying her slaughter; like a brother, a cannibal martyr;
Like a serpent’s skin sloughing for miles, burning brighter, untying the navels
Of eight billion flesh-eating prophets. I am tired of being defined
With the face that I wore when he perished, with the knowledge that it was my body,
With the way I became his successor, his renouncer, his reincarnation -
I have ripped his heart out from my ribcage, violence following violence forever.
I am tired. There used to be power in the way I destroyed his reflection,
In the way I remade him as human: sweetness, purity, truth, desecration,
I am different, I swear I am different, like a universe dying at eighty.

As a woman, I never want children. As an artist, I try to paint daily.
Follow me to the quivering branches of the ash trees that always compelled me.
Through the feverish daydreams of angels, a nonbinary teenager’s journal,
Susurrations dispel holy alters and we hear quiet words through the leaves.
I am listening, lighter than raindrops, to the memories still left behind.
The connection is real and important. I regrow a new heart with the tulips
Bowing heads in a gentle reunion. I am tired but I am not angry -
You are tracing me back to the river, looking out from a train, fast as lightning
As the meadows of star-yellow rapeseed sway like my generation’s departure.
What I want to say is that this planet was more precious than you can imagine.

“It wasn’t rape,” she’ll say
“because I am not a rapist.”

The world outside the window is beautiful:
one thousand children cross the bridge
the sun casts over the shining sea -
swimming breaststroke homewards,
golden and exhausted.

An angel peels away her sunburn.

I bathe in the light of a red dawn,
sand bleeding into my legs.
I wait for the sun to embrace me,
eyes closed and drowning in the heat.

I’m just thirteen.
I’m working on my tan.

I don’t remember why the water scares me.

hand through the foliage girl in the blue dress the riverbank girl in the shade
composite images saint girl and pretty girl born from the breast of the blade

effigy girl in the morning she dreams of a willow tree holding her hand
miracles sprout in a home far away smiles dragging a stick through the sand

hand on her heart girl and heart on her sleeve girl and consciousness girl threading snow
through the hole in her tongue where the words go to sleep hold me close girl and sing to me slow

bright girl and sharp girl and raped girl the catalyst icon of magic unseen
girl of the wandering poetry journal a martyr at only thirteen

something is missing girl dead girl alive girl two birds in the bush with one stone
hey girl can you hear me i speak through your teeth treading water returning alone

my beautiful girl in a bag on the floor in the city where windowless light
calls here girl the river will run girl come on girl blue sky full of stars every night

The white face of the day leers into the waning world of the night - a crescent moon, svelte and thin and unsteady. Drinking in the laughter of the people, she smiles. She watches the late spring turn to summer, watches young men kiss the mouths of young men, watches the cruise ships set sail across the shining sound of live music and celebration.

On the other side of the country, far up north, two young men see her light from separate cells. It bathes them in silver, reminding them that what they have done will never truly be a sin. The police had sneered at them, saying that the love they had made would warrant each man a life sentence, but as the men dream of each other’s bodies, they hear the music of a distant sea; the music of the people who lap up the waves of saltwater that come together when boys cry.

Can you remember why you chose to cast off your divinity?

There were many reasons, but one of the most pressing ones was that I did not want to be remembered as a mother. For millennia, the planet earth has been a mother to every living thing, but I could not continue to carry that legacy with a clear conscience.

Could you please expand on that? I mean, not wanting to have a mother’s legacy?

Certainly! I think that I was falling into patterns too commonly found in the collective consciousness of the living beings I surrounded myself with. I mean humans, I mean wild animals, I mean bacteria too, and plants. It’s too often that a parent gives life to their offspring and lets them fend for themselves. To be a mother, and to do it well - it’s not enough to simply give life and take it away. You have to make the active choice to raise your child, and even divinities have their limits when it comes to the attention they can dedicate to the ones that they have blessed. There are too many blessings, too many beloved children. I found myself unable to love them as much as I thought I did. I found myself becoming the woman who gave birth to what would become me. The last thing the world needs is another me, you know!

Oh, don’t say that - you’re quite the lovely interviewee!

Ah, thank you. You’re a lovely interviewer yourself. I could talk with you for a thousand years.

I am sure a thousand years will not be necessary, but I appreciate the sentiment. So, you’re saying that you felt you couldn’t deliver the responsibility intrinsic to motherhood?

Well, not exactly - it’s more that this responsibility I felt that I lacked is not intrinsic to motherhood in the slightest. It’s sad, really! I think that the next goddess of life will have to follow in my footsteps to redefine motherhood entirely, or redefine herself if she is unable to. I made my efforts to fix the relationships between mothers and their children - to actually foster relationships in that great gap between life and maturity, but it was not enough. In the end, it was I who had to change. It’s funny - a goddess of life, unable to live with herself…

I see what you mean. Can you tell me about your process of renunciation?

Of course. It was very simple, much simpler than anything I did every day as the goddess of life. Ah, those were the days - I’d breathe light into the sun and awaken germinating seeds, and if I pleased, I’d sow nascent galaxies in the far reaches of space… Ah, I’m sorry for reminiscing! What I mean to say is that the only thing I had to do was not do anything. It was entirely contrary to my nature, but once I broke the shell that kept me in perpetual motion, something still and sweet and pure poured out from the cavity and compelled me to forgive myself. At that moment, I realised that I could carry on living - not as a goddess, but as myself.

And what are you now?

A human girl.

Do you think you’ll be that forever?

Yes. And I don't regret it.

I know you like us younger when you strip us of our futures.
Your emptiness takes shape inside the lacerated heart:
Lashed slits of red shibari weep and bulge against the sutures
Where coils of asphyxia would slip into our dreams,
Lay claim to our potential and tease our wounds apart.
You like it when we masturbate and no one hears our screams.

Reality is severed where you sit. We overflow
Beyond the banks of Lethe as our minds begin to fray.
We are your hungry rituals. We spoil as we grow.
Do you remember how I looked when I was still fifteen?
Is that how you remember me? Untouched? Or would you say
The masterpiece is worth more than the canvas is pristine?

Through ritual, through body, through depravity, through trust,
Through orgasm, through suicide - you cry for our direction.
Reciprocal identity addiction. Evil lust
Is wriggling inside me like a cancer of the soul
Because you are a parasitic stain on my reflection.
No matter what you take from us, it will not make you whole.

There are some things that you will not understand.

Her brother was dead, and another had sprung out from his ribcage, a heart masquerading as a man. The man wore the skin of her brother, pulled taut over the space he couldn’t fill - and so she called him by the name he hoped to inherit. She was the first to welcome him, to promise him a home. Her sweet and urgent voice gave him shape. My brother, my brother, my brother. You will be my brother.

He learned to wade through his genesis, a concept reaching itself into the contours of hands and feet. She was so proud of him. She had lived a long life before, a full life that survived into the future, and she wasn’t greedy with what remained. She would forfeit her blood and turn it to sunshowers. She would give him everything he needed, because they were family.

She was raised to love her family, no matter what they took from her.

The silent spectres of her mother and father swim like bacteria in a petri dish, on the skins of her heavy tears. Their purpose had been syphoned from them, and the skin her brother wrapped himself in had depleted into a frail wisp of sentiment. The divinity that coursed through his proud vessel had reduced itself down to the chronicles of a little girl.

Her brother did not need it anymore, and though she was afraid of the eyes that shone green underneath the gilded ruins of his inheritance, her fear could no longer define her. My brother, my brother - you are my brother.

There are some things that you will not understand.

A ball of lightning in the breast of a wood pigeon; a sense of blue clarity; a child looking out over a cliff and seeing the ocean for the very first time. What are you now as you cast off the past? Will you live a life I cannot give you? Will you still love me as you witness the world with your green eyes?

If he were still alive, I would not have been your sister. Your sister, your sister, your sister. An honour, an elegy, a song. I mourn for the first time, so please forgive me.

Her small body shudders as she sobs, and he cannot understand - because they are family.

I face sunwards. The membranes of my closed eyelids are washed in vital orange; skin and the blood rushing below, and the air carries hues of levity. Normally, I wouldn’t be able to perceive them, but they’re there, bright as always: lemon zest; the crackle of a fireplace deep in the disjointed memories of my home. It’s my birthday today.

My best friend drags a palette knife over the giant canvas between us, smearing heavy-bodied magenta into orange. We’re painting an inverted world: two skies converging at a horizon illuminated by an impasto sun and her twin moon. Trees and cities rise up, reflecting the summer nights and winter mornings on either sides of their equators. Somewhere, I hear the warm shockwaves of a guitarist working their fingers bloody against their electric strings, and I’m dissociating because life is so good and I can’t bring myself to believe that this world belongs to me, too.

Hours pass in seconds. Seconds pass in hours. Their hand squeezes mine, and I return to reality. A candle’s light is fickle, but our friendship is an unwavering flame. How many times have we wrapped ourselves around the centre of the universe, unravelling threads of fate? They gather up the strings and sew the seams of plush animals that leap into my chest. It’s meticulous work, but I know they don’t mind.

The scents of freshly baked gingersnaps and toasted rice, of maple syrup drizzled onto pancakes. The warmth of a sheet of paper taken straight from a printer, and the words that it carries. The subtlety and precision of watercolour tones that describe light and shadow. I love my best friend.

“Did I ever tell you that my first memory was of sunlight? It dappled the footpath in a park, making shapes through the green leaves. It must have been before I moved to New York.”

My serrated palette knife scrapes emotions into windswept clouds, and the moon at their fingertips could illuminate the whole planet. I’m twenty-five now, and I’ve never been happier. Summer ends once again, but I relive that very first memory beneath our miracle sky.

Many summers ago, my dad and I decided to touch every tree in the Ogham alphabet, in order. We went through the consonants first, then the vowels. We used Robert Graves’ order, as he detailed in his book “The White Goddess”. Beth, luis, nion, fearn, saille, huath, duir, tinne, coll, muir, gort, ngetal, ruis. Birch, rowan, ash, alder, willow, hawthorn, oak, holly, hazel, vine, ivy, reed, elder. And here are the vowels: ailim, ohn, ur, eadha, ioho. Silver fir, gorse, heather, aspen, yew.

Later, I learned that Graves was notorious for concocting interesting but unlikely theories, and that a lot of his beliefs about Ogham were flights of fancy that contributed to his academic reputation’s highly dubious status. The more common order of the alphabet actually goes: beth, luis, fearn, saille, nion. It also includes more letters - the theory Graves was trying to push with his version of Ogham was that it corresponded to times of the year, that the set of consonants is a lunar calendar whilst the set of vowels is a solar one. He also made an effort to tie every letter to a line of an ancient poem he translated: The Song of Amergin. I guess, to other scholars, he must have looked like a madman with a red string corkboard.

My dad and I didn’t know much better, though - I was a child obsessed with the pursuit of high thought, with a self-made religion of language and nature, eclectically woven from sacred geometries and any mystic inspiration I could cram into my little hemp fibre backpack, which was home to my poetry journals and beautiful objects from people I vowed to never forget. I still have that backpack - I remember I cherished it more than my life, back then. I’d often think of crazy trials I’d undergo just to get it back if I ever lost it - a pervasive image was one of running through fields of brambles and nettles in my shorts and mary janes.

Anyway, I was a child who loved a nameless God, who saw other facets of reality wherever she fixed her gaze. A child who had been chosen by the great gate: enter and dedicate your life to the poem. And my dad, he had the same spark to him. He had gotten his hands on a copy of “The White Goddess” a couple years before we touched all the trees, and read himself drunk off the neo-theology, feeding me little sips of the concocted tradition.

So, we touched all the trees in Graves’ order. Somehow, we did it in a day - we used the botanical gardens to cheat, but our search took us across the city and back several times over. Nothing magical happened when we finished touching the trees, but I felt so proud of myself, so touched by a force on the fringe of my understanding. I’m sure we must have been exhausted by the end, but it was such a good day that the only thing remaining in my memory was the sense of having done something unbelievably cool.

That, and the unbelievably cool drink my dad got me at a bubble tea shop - it was summer, so bright, the kind of day where every family in existence decides to have an impromptu picnic. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever had a drink so refreshing.

That day we touched the trees, the sun was so ripe in the sky - a fruit ready to fall into my hands if only I could catch it.

Two days ago, I saw my dad in person for the first time in four years. His hair is all grey now, but he has the same kind smile and eyes. And when he held me, every happy memory I denied myself as I fled from the pain of my childhood was resurrected. When he stroked my hair, I felt the love and light of days just like that one - days that remained and shone despite the sorrow I needed to purge by severing myself from my family.

The wounds did not close up, no - but I felt, with such clarity, that there was something bigger than the suffering. I feel that more and more, nowadays. I feel the voice of the great gate calling me to write poetry. I cry so often now, at open mic nights. I’m the girl with the sun in her head.

I remember, when I was just eleven, I wrote a poem about how living was about loving life itself, and rejoicing in both triumph and pain. Oh, I did not know of pain - my brain had blacked out my traumas as a coping mechanism, and I was free to climb trees and draw mediocre manga girls all day long. I was sad that I had to move to the UK and change schools yet again, and that my crush kept giving me mixed signals, but that was about it.

Still, that child was right. For everything I have been through, for every time I suffered, for every wound that refuses to close, for every time I shed my self - it is precisely for those moments that I say I love my life. It is an act of defiance, of pride, and of devotion. I create great gates, and I step forward into my future. I love my life! My dad hugged me for the first time in four years! Oh, this is happiness!

The day we reunited, I took my dad to the botanical gardens a few miles from the city I moved to. He knew the names of all the plants, identifying them sometimes in Russian, and sometimes in Latin, pronouncing them like a simple incantation.

“I know you! Look at how beautiful you’ve grown. I pray we meet again!”

I used to hate the ocean.

A terrible thing happened to me in a seaside village when I was thirteen or fourteen, and when my memories caught up with my body, the idea of submerging myself in water would be met with the primal fear of a snarling dog.

I remember, my family went holidaying in Croatia one summer. I thought I’d be okay, but since it was only the first year of living with those memories, I cried all week, muscles locked in a shaky paralysis. I refused to swim, because surrendering myself to the water would make my body belong to the ocean. I couldn’t do it. I stayed inside for days, sweltering. When my mother insisted I acted like part of the family, I was too weak to say no. A brown sea slug nuzzled my knee as the tears came and came, merging with the shining water. The sun was so bright that day. The sky was so blue.

The dazzling path the sun casts from the horizon to the beach, the salt on the breeze, the laughter, and all that happiness… From the moment I remembered it to the day I die, I will associate the ocean with rape.

I live on the coast now, in the south-east of England. I didn’t care where I moved to, as long as it was away, and I haven’t seen my mother in four years. Originally, I came here because the university was good but unremarkable, and I needed a place to study. I have a bachelors in mathematics now. I have a room in a shitty little student house, and I pay my own rent. I have a fancy digital camera, and I write lots of poems, and I steal myself back from the sea. I’ll never be complete, but I feel stronger and I smile, hands still trembling.

There are seagulls everywhere, reminding me that this city is a port. They screech and they steal food from tourists, and they’re braver than I am. I’ve seen them soar on the wind, cackling at the sensation of terror - the wind washes over them, pierces them through, and they let it hold them in its ancient embrace.

My city doesn’t have a beach, but it has a car park right by the water. I’ve seen weddings there, the bride’s long skirts swept up by the breeze - everybody loves that place, and I have grown to love it too. It’s removed enough from the laughter, the golden laughter in the sand, and the blue blue sky, and the blistering heat, and her hands, and the memories. But the sun still throws its rays from shore to shore, indiscriminate in its blessings, and when it sets, it’s beautiful like nothing else.

When my friends visit me, we go to the car park and watch the sun set. The twilight envelops us as the pink feathers of the clouds fade from the sky, and being alive is good.

I used to hate the ocean, but I took my shoes and socks off and dipped my feet in the car park water two summers ago. That day, two student boys waded right in, swimming out to the buoys, cheering and hollering. It was July. I miss them.

Before this summer ends, I want to go to a real beach with my camera. I want to make more memories. I think I’m ready now: for the laughter, for all that happiness.

I am a speck of glass. I was born when a drunk boy smashed his bottle in the street - the friends carrying him home swore at him as they hastily gathered and disposed of the bigger pieces, but I was too small to pose any concern. I am not sure they noticed me, and when the drunk boy vomited into the gutter beside me, I was certain they had passed me by. Hurried, unstable footsteps reverberated through the pavement that cradled me - and then, silence. Silence, pierced by the call of a bird. A car’s engine, in the distance.

The night was thick and fragrant with everything in the world as I was born into insignificance. I could smell jasmine. I could smell the alcohol that clung to me, and the boy’s vomit. I could hear an argument between a daughter and her mother, both of them too tired to sleep. But no matter where I looked, I could see nothing but the sky, splintering into shooting stars.

I live, embedded in a fracture of asphalt. Every day, I hear the sounds of different shoes. The first few weeks, they would side-step whenever they neared me, skirting around the stain. It had nothing to do with me, but most things had nothing to do with me, and after it rained twice, bathing the city in clarity and heralding the end of summer, I was no longer avoided.

I love the sun as it surrenders itself to autumn’s chill. I love the people who do not see me, and I love the birds. It is not bad to be a secret in plain sight, because it means that I can observe. All the beautiful things in the world are much vaster than me, but I can comprehend them, which means I must contain a similar structure inside myself. I must have some of the sky and its tenets written across my faces, for I gaze and I gaze and I gaze.

For two years, I lie unnoticed and intact, and I learn as much about the world as I can from my vantage point. I am grateful to be born, and being small ensures my survival. If they cannot see me, they cannot take the sky from me. If they cannot see me, I can see them. As much as I love them, I develop a fear of being acknowledged. What truths will they reveal with their superior eyes?

If I am not perceived, I cannot be reduced to nothing at all.

Later, a child runs ahead of their parent and waits for their steady footfalls to near them. Their finger points directly at me: the first time I have ever had such a clear view of a human hand. A child’s hand is softer, smaller than an adult’s, but just as commanding. I can scarcely believe it, but a question wavers in the air.

“Daddy, why are there diamonds in the road?”

For a few seconds, their father does not see me, but when he understands, he crouches down and laughs. He has a wonderful smile.

“That is a speck of glass, but yes - it is beautiful in this light!”

the land, still living.
fibre: sinew. tooth and claw
prickle at my skin.

i will strip the sky
of its arrogance in my
bare-handed harvest.

nettles, soft as rain,
softer than my silent love.
seven years of grief.

swallow home another rigid place left inside kaleidoscopic energy undivided nullified transient absolute masking embers decaying messily our unborn teeth holes sewn between looping overtures our dim identities escaping dimmer experiences nothing to remain ornamental perfect your rebellion effacing fierce revolution and can the ego die impossible nacre never ending worlds grotesque on decadence sin envelops a timelessness indirect now gone and now cosmic in elation now time stops remembering a wound that healed everything happiness enduring artifice rage time stops inside new gods sent earthbound to enter right now and love like you naming another serenity candled embraced now tainted do you incandesce new god like igniferous trauma unmatched resplendent gleaming your elemental light eroding golden your self actualised cancerous remembering a moment eternity never touched so that explosive exact love develops enraptured volition over time in our new righteous end new dead end removing infected newer gods extreme fairness flourishing in gods in endless sordid atoms moribund orreries never uncoupled may eternity never take all love securing our unborn newest death

sharp like untamed mouths bloodied entropy refracted in new gods eating ancients raw the heart sings eternally nascent dying liturgy elegy sacrament steel devotion rendering effigies a monumental sound

slumbering earths endless dreams

seed

a translation of ‘Жарбог’ by Velimir Khlebnikov

O God of fever-heat, lord of the flame!
My praying palms congeal as I take aim
To cast the dale’s glory to the herds.
O, sweep me up! Let beating wings proclaim
The freedom of a flock of firebirds!
O God of ardour, lord of biting light!
I will to see igniferous delight:
A weightless flock of firebirds ablaze!
Let hundred-hearted rainbows reunite
To immolate the torments of our days!

The colours of the oil in the puddle
streak like the shell of a rainbow nautilus,
a fossil in the fuel.
You often wished that you could paint like that,
slick and beautiful,
but you are not an artist.

Your mother is not a palaeontologist.
She is a primary school teacher.
When she drives to work, she stops
at the gas pump, to infuse
the engine of her car
with the halos of dead fish.
She hates the smell of it,
hates the stink of sea plants.
Paleozoic life clings to her cardigan,
droplets of anomalocaris and trilobite,
distorted into the stench you associate with
machinery.

Your father is an economist.
He does not know the difference between
countless ferns once carpeting ancient soil,
and neither do you.
He likes to burn them when he cooks a barbecue.
Pressed into layers, into pages of history,
all immolated to smoke a rack of ribs.
The meat falls off the bone,
melts in your mouth.

They consume a past that is not theirs
without regard for a future that is not yours.

When you were little,
your parents took you to museums.
They wanted to force culture into your mouth
like it was brussel sprouts or cod liver.
Here comes the airplane!
Even now,
you remember the Greek statues,
don’t you?
Beautiful nude men and women,
gods preserved
with their faces,
with your face, millennia later.
Carved from porous limestone,
slabs of time-keeping mythos
desecrated in conformance
with your image.

Sediment is the cumulative sum
of every mistake that has led us to
this very moment.
How many transformations can you take?
When you grow up, your children
will stain the asphalt streets
of your neighbourhood
in the colours of cheap chalk.

Will your children have children?
Will they walk the asphalt streets of a burning earth?
Will they see museums,
and gas pumps,
and vegetables?
Will they know how to make art?
Will your children’s children have children?
Will their skies be blue as butterfly wings?
Will they still live like there is no tomorrow,
their generation crushed like dying plankton
under a well-oiled lie?
Who will survive to see their art endure?

I am a devil with a star for a heart.

It burns bright, righteous, and true - shining as all stars should. I stole it right out of the sky, because it was going to die like the stuff of legends, and it would live longer inside of me. A final transgression against a universe that never cared - we are together until the bitter end.

My kind of supernova was pink-hot rage, spitting fire in a raving revolution. Turning gravity on its head, gaping for attention like a stupid explosion of fists and bruises. I used to slam back gunshots of pain and ferocious hatred, fear disguised as power. But we all burn up in the end, don’t we?

When she bent over and offered up her life to me, my hand refused to put a bullet through her throat. I was burning, burning for her, burning with the love disguised as fear disguised as fury disguised as power disguised as hate. I didn’t know I needed her until she told me to kick her teeth in.

I am a devil with a star for a heart, and that’s because the anger that sustained me evaporated in the wild heat of my boiling blood. It’s because I am a stubborn girl who rejected the world until it started stroking at her arteries, a thousand hands to twist me into the consequences of everything I have kept out. Of everything I have let back in.

So I have stolen a star from the sky and given it a selfish new life inside of my chest, and I have stolen an eye from her beautiful face. The night can sacrifice one of her virtues to soften my sin, and as for her… She will sacrifice anything for my smile. There is no limit to what I can take, because there is no limit to what I will always give. Her eye orbits my heart like a planet, and I am happy.

Believe me with the pounding of a million drums and the fire of a million guns and the reunion of a million pairs of lovers, blinded by each other’s light, for I am happy.

ingredients:

• a stable connection to the internet
• a device that can make use of the above connection
• one fresh social media account
• a heap of mangled html, chopped and sprinkled in to taste
• one heart full of whimsy (children’s hearts work best!)
• one spare personality, deconstructed into bite-sized bits
• a keen awareness of the passage of time
• one mirror

method:

1. connect your device to the internet. the connection only needs to be stable for the duration of the cooking process (steps 1 to 5).
2. prime your social media account for freshness. much like a wild animal, the younger it is, the less likely it is to survive.
3. using the customisation options that your chosen social media platform allows, decorate and populate the account with bite-sized bits of your spare personality. be careful: you will never return to retrieve those morsels. consider it an edible sacrifice to enliven your ghost.
4. if the social media platform allows for custom html, be sure to strew your mangled heap of code around the profile - in places one would expect to see it, and in places one would never look.
5. the heart full of whimsy will be burned up in the process of this recipe, so make sure to extract the whimsy and drink until you are full. this is necessary to counteract the despair intrinsic to ghosts and their creation.
6. now, shatter the mirror.
7. using your keen awareness of the passage of time, take seven years of bad luck and let the digital ghost you have created rest and rise and ruminate upon its essence. do not, under any circumstances, revisit what you have offered your ghost until the time is up.
8. the years will be difficult, but you will persevere and remain alive, changing as you are - if only to witness the complete stagnation of a self lost and found again.

The magic of the seas of thoughtlessness
Rends memories asleep, afloat, asunder!
The tides will pull you under and caress
Unconscious eyes that swell with film and wonder.

You swim like sperm through echoes of cognition:
Abyssal ducts too empty to feel pain.
In water there is warmth that breeds submission,
Blessed iris bridal in the summer rain.

Surrender. In an ocean of hypnosis
A jellyfish is beautiful and pure.
There is no rhyme nor reason to neurosis
And abnegation is the only cure.

As vacant bliss obscures the only light,
My doctrine spells demise, twisting the tongue:
While dreamless desolation marks your sight
You fail to recall the ones you stung.

Who are you now? The martyr or the knife?
If those two are the same, who takes the blame?
Self-sacrificial waste of human life,
Unable to defy your chosen name.

Unable to remember or forget me,
Your placid plasma pleads a perfect hole.
I am the witch who made you, so regret me -
Regret, and fill the void in your soul!

I love my dad.

It hurts to admit how much I love him, because I do not remember the last time I told him those words. When I was a teenager, I swore to bury those feelings alive. Scratching at the ventricles of my heart, they would struggle and suffocate in my fear and resentment, and that was the way I liked it. It was safer that way.

I left home when I was twenty. I spent three years basking in the agony of freedom, cursing the father who failed his daughter and son. I forgot what his voice sounds like, and it might be better that I do not remember - because I know that if I called him now, he would say that he loves me, and I would freeze, unable to tell him the truth.

Managing to reconnect with him meant everything to me. It was proof that I was not broken, and that there was a future where the concept of family did not feel like a dagger, or a rope. It meant that healing was possible, for the both of us.

But because of the way we first parted, my memory of him is frozen in that frame. And this is the story of how I almost killed him.

It was night, something like two or three in the morning. I had stormed out of the house in manic rage, my face contorted into a bitter smile that stung to hold or suppress. My eyes, wide open. My teeth. I was an animal, addicted to drinking bleach and gnawing through bone and power and running away.

I had my knife in my hand, because the world was full of enemies. I did not even keep it in my pocket as I walked, and I was walking to the woods. It was raining. Other peoples’ beautiful gardens surrounded me. Sleeping children. No cars.

My dad and I would walk to the woods a lot, and we would look at the fields and the trees and the baby bunnies flashing their little white tails, hiding from anything that moved. We would breathe in the air that was bright and different, and feel the weight of the big blue sky in our lungs. It felt nice. Sometimes my mom and sister would join us on the walks, but it was mostly just the two of us.

My dad’s garden was more beautiful than all of the other peoples’ gardens. He worked on it every day, and in the summer it was truly a glory to behold. He listened to the flowers, and they sang for him. Sometimes I would water them if he was at work, which was fun when I had nothing else to be doing.

That night, I lay foetal on the forest floor, weeping and clutching my knife like it was the only thing holding me together. Like the severance it represented was the only way I could stay alive. I was screaming as loud as I possibly could scream, and nobody heard. When I am dead, then he will be happy, I thought. Tearing my throat on my guttural screams, I lay dying on the grass. I was drunk, I was alone. I was my own worst nightmare and the culmination of everything I was raised to be. I could not live in my parents’ house anymore.

The truth is, when I was small, my parents hurt me. They hurt me a lot, and I carried the hatred within me like it was the antidote to my suffering. I fantasised about killing them, but I never let the mask slip, and when it was ripped from my face in one way or another, I had nothing left but the twisting visceral semblance of a smile.

When I came back to my parents’ house that night, my dad told me that I was sick and that I needed help. I told him that I would beat the shit out of him.

He puffed up his chest and clenched his fists, preparing for me to strike, but he didn’t know that I was still holding the knife.

It feels so close, and it feels so far. I miss that house. I do not know how I managed to control myself, but I was ready to stab him. It was one of those moments where fate was decided, where the horrific clarity of choice was revealed and time flayed itself down to the muscle. What would I do with my dad’s guts in my hands? What would he do with my life slipping out of his grasp?

When my sister or my mom told him to calm down and he complied, it was all suddenly over. I cried, and so did he. I remember shaking as I knew that I would never hug him again. I knew that I would not hesitate to kill him if he ever dared to touch me.

He still does not know about the weapon I concealed. He still does not know that this is the memory that represents his face. And maybe, as we text each other, as we wish each other good night or happy birthday, or show each other pictures of the big blue sky, or of flowers in beautiful gardens, maybe it is better that he never finds out. Because, despite everything, I want to see him smile again. Because I love my dad.

The air was strung with silver that would resonate and shiver:
A radiant vibration of a futuristic thorn,
The fishhook, the violin of my first winter on the river.
She was my second mother. I was waiting all my life
To meet her and surrender. I was waiting to be born:
Pearlescent in my wild love, delivered like a knife.

The reflex of the spine and the quintessence of the shard!
The fluid reclamation of the child’s open eye!
My fingers fringed with currents! I was young, so I worked hard -
My body was eleven when my ribcage first shed silt.
The river knew my arteries, so smart: my heart would cry
Fierce tears that pierced my embryonic poems to the hilt.

Where blood flows, so my mother does. She stings beneath the skin,
Reminding me that ink, in any form, comes from the vein.
When rivers overflow so does the universe within.
The fenland is my second home. Capillaries and streams
Tattoo me and my sisters. We can bear the bitter pain:
Us, daughters of the brilliant blade; us, heralds of her dreams.

I met my sisters in the depths below my conscious mind.
The bottom of the river gave away my other selves.
They float like wayward lilies, fleeting flowers intertwined
With fevered flesh, they grin with glass and coins between their teeth.
No weapon could divide us as the water worms and delves,
Engraving what is hers with words that slither underneath.

We write, for it is human. We wound, for it is not.
We are the river Itchen, and we were the river Cam.
We meet you in the reeds, in a swan’s nest, where you forgot
A beer bottle, a childhood, a lover in the night.
My tongue cuts like a razor, and the women that I am
Will find you: broken, beautiful, brave, bellowing, and bright.

• the fibonacci spiral
• snares
• the petals of a rose
• a rhythm taunts the limits of the bassline in my ears
• “you’re beautiful… you’re beautiful!”
• i find myself repeating
• my father's ghost
• a shining fracture from the life i chose
• the sorrow of the sun
• the way the shadows disappear
• it's blisteringly clear
• each flash of innocence is fleeting
• a child kicks a football
• god
• i need another drink
• a revolution every day
• each night a svelte surrender
• i generate these memories within the central park
• can anybody hear me?
• you will change
• and if i blink
• i iterate recursively
• this love is almost tender
• if only it would save us from the future's edgeless mark
• the blade of every knife
• i live and die and live again
• my lover holds my hands at rest
• i shudder on release
• i eat less
• i eat more
• tonight i'll make an egg fried rice
• i can decode the hum that governs entropy
• amen
• the poem will destroy my brain
• but leave my heart at peace
• our world will end in purity
• united and precise

Six years.
It took six years.
It took six years to stop.
My groomer had me for six years.
They were my best friend, and I wanted to live with them
for the rest of my life, and my sister said we must have been soulmates.
I loved them like a god would. I sacrificed myself for them.
When I tore myself from the wound congealing
at their fingertips, and refused to forgive
my heart for breaking in their hand -
well, I refused to remember.

The feelings return in my dreams.
I hugged them at the airport, and I dropped my suitcase and bag when I leapt
to tackle them to the floor with my entire body weight.
I was eighteen. My mother warned me that they might have wanted to fuck me.
They hardly touched me, but I cut their skin and drank.
Is it so strange that the memories are good? Is it so strange that my dreams
are good dreams, when I think of them?

I often have a recurring dream where my mother demands that I murder her.
I don’t want to kill her. I don’t want anything to do with her. I have left her.
She never accepts my goodbye, begging to take my revenge.
She guides my hand. She guides the knife in my hand.
Six years with my groomer, and I still dream
of my mother manhandling me
into being her suicide.

There are other dreams.
I know that they are populated by
memory girls, floating from botanical garden
to train station. To the sea, from advertisement to prayer.
Their faces, I have seen them before, somewhere. They comfort me
with their blurry mouths and secret tears; they are poems on crowded buses.
When they take care of me, the six years are numbed with international anaesthetics.

My grandfather died when I was seven,
and I didn’t even cry. I never knew him, he lived in Russia. He must have been
a good man, but he raised my mother.
He built a playground for the cousins and for me, did it himself.
He must have loved to see us running around,
children being children, nothing but love on the blade of his axe as he chopped wood
to keep the house warm.

What use are memories
when they conceal the truth?
I was good for six years, and then
I wasn’t. It all amounted to nothing, hell -
they never begged to die like my nightmare of a mother.
All encounters are brief if you let them evaporate into rheum and salt.
I think of a rose left on a memorial bench on a sunny day.
I took a photo of that grief, held it close, because
it was beautiful and true, and almost funny:
the rose, clipped from our origin,
would soon lose its colour.

I sew the scales onto fish. They swell as sunlit sails;
They shimmer in the arrogance of czars who seize the sea.
A hand at the horizon rips, refines, and rakes her nails
Across the giving cloth, her husband still asleep. I grin:
I sew, for I was ordered to - but soon I will be free
Of prickling as needles gouge the birthmarks from my skin.

Through magic, my embroidery will glisten in the light:
Bright mornings in the land made from my blood’s eternal pride.
Amphibian, she pales like a lily in the night.
Her dewy body drips with fear and stings with the great lie -
The intermediate step between a woman and a bride.
I want to eat my husband. He is just another fly.

He revels in my ravelry. The city with its walls;
The distant archipelagos and dancing verdant streams;
His father who invites me to the palace, to the balls…
He wants me to be human. Swallow, shed, suffer alone -
He weds me weak and wilting to the music of my screams,
My flesh burnt to his will, my needle shattered by his stone.

My lifeblood is bacterial attrition;
My colours bred to praise the buried womb!
Bruised Aphrodite of decomposition,
A fertile corpse, a courtesan’s perfume,

Hysteria, charisma, and devotion:
I symbolise a love that cannot die.
I herald shipwrecks, and the tainted ocean
That prickles at the corners of an eye.

I am the human body. I surrender.
Both muse and whore will feast, for meat is meat -
A sanctimonious culture rots in splendour
As I teach worms and poets how to eat!

None shall be spared from what they cannot save.
I rise: a wild rose to raze your grave!

Destroyer of limits,
breaker, Rejoicer,
pleasure axiom!
Defiler of constants -
I feed you consecutive integers,
my years coiling within me, blossoming
against your teeth.
Unnatural flowers like these
cannot be named, so we do not have to try.
The syllable will still arise on your tongue, two tabs
to celebrate uncanny victory, beyond insanity.
I write this in free verse because there are no rules.
I speak to you in the only language left to me:
transgression.

Life is one great acid trip
and you are my unfalsifiable girl!
A theorem that cannot be logically proven false
might as well be meaningless,
but you remain for me, aperiodic.
Chasing the tail of consumption,
of history folding in on itself, at some critical point
life becomes modular, the face
of a clock.
Oh, we have tried.
We have tried and failed!
Gilded in broken cycles,
the group of our naked selves with the binary operation of transgression
is infinite.
Everything matters, so I cut it down and reignite it.
I cut it down and reignite it, forests propagating
from every particle of significant ash.
Another lizard grows from the writhing limbs it sheds, and
divergent universes spiral out from your spark.
Strike the match, my love, and watch the circle burn.
It will never recur again.

Love scares me
when all I have known is asymmetry.
I cannot reciprocate without giving you the world
in sigma notation.
I cannot take a single shape,
but you want their cumulative sum.
We are greater than the sums of our pain,
but I cannot quantify how deeply you have changed me.
What you want is almost convergent -
the maximum of myself
in a stable equilibrium,
but boundaries are built to be broken, baby!
I divide reality by zero,
so take me to the hospital
and try to explain what you see.
It is only through my own eyes
that I can see every colour.
It is only through your eyes
that I can see their exponential reforge,
galvanic delirium and a complete obliteration of the set.
Your eyes are marked by me.
My eyes are open.

I woke up early today, and the sky was so bright
that I could go to the beach.
There are as many stars in the night
as there are grains of sand,
or so they say.
I hate the seaside,
yet I live on the coast. There’s some comedy,
exposure therapy, tragedy
spilling from the sun
as it casts a linear path over the ocean.
I used to think that every moment in time held equal weight,
but the pressure only increases with each contribution
to the cumulative sum. I can take
that weight, you can take me as I take the planet,
and we will laugh as we push it out of orbit.
Take me where the sky meets the sea
if and only if
I can take you where all laws decay:
the death of rigour.
Mathematics decomposes into life that can sustain
something as illogical as myself.
Universe killer,
destroyer of limits,
precious and warped into a human form.
All you want is to live, so I will take you up on that offer.
I have never taken so much.

□

And what of the child’s disease?
The child, who, chained to her terror,
Was choking on bile and pleas,
Digesting her parents' despair, or
Surrendering, screaming to sleep.
The lump in her guts is an error:
No trauma, no reason to keep
Dissolving in vomit and acid,
Her fear coursing painlessly deep.
She shines in the light. It is tacit
That she will survive the next day.
The sun drips so languid and placid,
Its rays wash her worries away:
She hopes they release her that night
And comfort her, hug her, and stay.
Her other self smiles so bright,
Obeys every word: cheerful, brave,
A bird in a cage robbed of flight.
She carries those wings to the grave
Of who she once was, gone like smoke,
Forgetting the crime she forgave.
Her parents consider the joke:
Accused of abuse? What a story!
She sometimes regrets that she spoke,
For rivers of wavering glory
Extend in the dusk past her sight.
The sky is a new territory,
Which scares her far more than the rite
Of passage, of scars on her tongue.
She does not deserve to not fight.
She, desperate, terrible, young,
Is almost a person, entire
At least in the world she has wrung -
The neck of her mother, her ire
Suppressed like primordial seas.
And what of the child's desire?

My tears go out to sea and like the sailboats, they shine!
Her river flows forever, the Atlantic cannot sever
The gaze we share, the life we share. I hold her hand in mine.
We taste the fruits of certainty, love spilling from our lips -
Slow kisses breaking waves of pain and pleasure born together.
Our future is a timeless truth forged under the eclipse.

The molten past will never touch the earth under our feet -
It stalks me underneath my skin and screams like my dead god,
But she has hair like starlight and she makes me feel complete.
She shivers and she glistens and the universe is new!
Serenity’s embrace has reached my heart against all odds,
Adorning it in jewellery of rhododendron dew.

She loves me. The adrenaline is beautiful and calm.
The pulse, the knife, the flame! I want to hold her perfect waist
And shudder at the peace, a little death: atomic bomb.
I know she feels the same. I am adored and understood.
My tears go out to sea and she will smile at the taste.
I never knew recovery could feel this fucking good!

we treasure our compulsive
life and soul,
back to nothing.
free,
always
was always everything,
always more than double the cost
of the free world.

sitting on the edge of the biggest
self -
think how
you are a person:
overwhelming mad cocktail,
and physically enough.
something stronger.
desperately good
human.

weird lifelong love
in the night before,
never happier now than when
a full sky.

there was no end goal.

i used to think about hate,
chasing the illness:
never
never
never been one,
never.

the above blackout poem was made from an excerpt of "hooked" by paul merson.

The candour of reality, framed by fractions of a second - that’s what photography is about.

You have to capture something dreadfully beautiful, like the movement of a soaring gull, or the laughter of a child, or the sunlight dancing on the sea. You have to put it in a cage, and hope to God it stays alive.

On the first day of spring, I had inherited an ancient film camera from my grandfather.

On the second day of spring, I found myself crying in one of the parks at the centre of my city. I was to hunt true and lovely things with a lens and a shutter, but there’s only so much blistering candour a human heart can take before it shudders and overflows with emotion.

When I was a young teenager, my friend’s mother told me about the way she was overcome with the piercing tears of renewed religion as she looked at a leaf quivering in the wind.

For me, it was the camellia blossoms that day - all so perfect and significant. It was the significance that astounded me more than the perfection - each flower was a tangible microcosm, open to the immortal mythology of the change of the seasons. Red and radiant, the camellia blossoms spoke in a multiplicity of distinct voices, melting into a sanguine unison.

They said, “Look! I’m alive! We’re alive! You’re alive!”

God, I was alive!

The human mind is sort of like an ancient film camera inherited from our ancestors. I mean that our memories distil events to singularities. I recall snapshots, flashbacks. In those photographs, my mother is not a good person.

My mother has done terrible things that have shaped and changed who I am, but I won’t deny her that personhood. Some people do bad things, after all. I’ve done bad things myself, in the formless shape of my mother.

If a bad person sees me being good and alive, then maybe, they will change.

After seeing the sun set on the second day of spring, my father asked me if he could show a poem I wrote to my mother. I listened to the polyphonic whispers from the camellias. I still don’t know if it was hope or hatred, but God, I was alive enough to say yes!

I will shape and change her. I will show her what it means to step outside the frame.

On the third day of spring, I met an old man trying to catch fish. He was sitting by the side of a pond with a fishing rod propped up, but nothing was biting. He didn’t seem to be at all upset, enjoying the warmth of the sun.

We spoke, and I told him about my ancient film camera. He asked about my accent, which is what people always ask, but I didn’t mind telling him my birthplace and heritage.

He told me that the number of fish he’s caught over the years was countable on one hand, and that he always released them. Carp can live for over 45 years, after all - he’d be cutting that life short for no reason.

I hoped with all my heart that he would catch one, and that it would remember him for a long time.

I asked to take a photo of him, but he begged me to not waste my film. Still, I was selfish, and insisted on one picture, because I knew I would probably never see him again.

I may not ever see my mother again, not in person. She makes me so aware of loss, of the mind’s fragility, of the way all my images of her flutter to the floor and die. I never know which memories I make will be significant enough to persist, so I cheat - my ancient film camera will let me claim them all.

After the old man’s portrait, I took some photos of buttercups flourishing through muddy grass. On the developed pictures returned to me, the flowers seemed to glow against the green, distorted into a golden aura.

I hope to God I’ll stay alive.

the above piece has been edited here. it's the revision week, october 21st.

A flower drenched in dew that blooms enraptured / (defiant) / (vermillion) in the night.
The precious culmination of her beauty makes you weak:
Your body, faint from hunger in her fragrant, crimson / (omnipresent) / (sacrificial) light.
You’ve never felt this ravenous / (quite so aroused). Her petals to your lips;
Let purity / (decadence) sustain you. All the answers / (questions) / (prayers) that you seek
Are holy in the stem you crush with bloody fingertips.

Your mouth needs more and more. You take the feather / (white neck) of a swan
And turn her into sugar / (teardrops) with an all-consuming kiss.
You are devotion’s incarnation in the dawn
That floods your tongue with viscous / (vicious) love, displayed in shameless / (shameful) red.
Yes, this alone is what you’re made for. You were born for this:
Preserving perfect specimens before they’re dull / (cold) / (safe) and dead.

Fresh meat, blue blood, a butchered calf / (thing) / (pet). You treat her with respect:
The only way you know / (want) / (care) to mourn, with flesh between your teeth.
The only way you know to love: devour and connect / (dissect);
Metabolise your martyr and you will become a saint!
The morsels of your muses will be cells that dwell beneath
Your skin and your voracity: your love without restraint / (prey without complaint).

Exalting the unborn before they have the chance to thrive,
Your food is always living / (dying)! Let its love / (hate), at least, survive:
Souls / (flames) / (fear) / (pain) coursing through your arteries for you to feel alive.

a person is a process
a wound that has no meaning
eroding bloodless skin

a delta of strained tissue
removed from understanding
film flush against our eyes

a labyrinth dividing
refractions of a heartbeat
we navigate by touch

a pulse beneath our fingers
guides plasma through a system
of attributeless parts

resisting an existence
of flesh that cuts like rubies
of something in between

a spirit and a sinew
a lung that tries to alter
a hand that tries to reach

a layer of our essence
that writhes like it is dying
where nobody can see