Spider Necklace

That spiderwebs look like necklaces is hardly surprising. You made really good use of the cookies. They lived in your brain and measured time like a smart meter to cost more, horrible sharp smell of time, golden darling. The temperature got cold enough so that spiderwebs were necklaces encrusted with sharp frost, to unhook from trees and arabesques of gate to wear at night. The people took pictures of glaciated cities and posted them on the outer gates, with affections measured by the gram. They wore black tourmaline wolf spiderlings and blizzard stone zebras to cover their décolletage. Inside the small room, scared my hot water bottle would burst on me, I was too cold to have glamour. I looked at my golden darling coming close to coming, I could hardly wait for winter to end its solo guitar on the buttress of autumn. It wasn’t as though time snatched the web from her neck and said no more posting, no more selling yourself short as a small glass animal. Often I was a gelid cadaver, after a fuck. The man on the podcast who was a famous director said he hated to be in pain and encouraged women to stop poking their own wounds. He said to do things that made you feel better, instantly, and he put those words in the mouth of a blonde and glamorous actress. I used to buy lighthearted eyeliner and dot my face with artificial freckles to look ‘healthy’. Squinting at the sun is a personality. The moon is our universal friend. Those cookies will be hatching soon and we’ll live in the fat of their secrets. I couldn’t be alone again, especially with the gimmick machine of octovision. I had studied the web and was now found styling myself a spider matriarch, highly resistant to magic, indulged in the cannibalism of love’s imaginary, myself at the end of Verity Spott’s Hopelessness. Frost crystals glitter in the gathering wind saying people make mistakes. You can tear this from me, all of my necklacing sentence, I don’t care anymore.

First Day

My first day at language was painful – wasn’t yours?

Comprehension passages were my forest experience, sexual discovery etc. Why was that girl stealing seeds?

First day as a tree, first day as a ginger. Quality of energy and tying your laces at crotch-level or solar adornment. Ugh. I never did learn to tan. I was always raining.

First day as a patient.

Write a detailed analysis of the means by which the writer captures a moment in time.

Aye for an aye.

Frozen trachea. Osteoporosis of form.

Don’t you understand the poem has to mean something? I mean it always does?

You are lucky if you wrote your name on a tree in 1993
because now it is nearly thirty years old
and the wound persists
a loose idea.

Didn’t you do it too?

I was a loose leaf

a marigold, love-in-the-mist
or simple bean.

Sap-hot.

All out of luck.

First word was duck

duck goose.

Ornament & Missouri

Once, the temperament of the bellflower was of concern to me. I wrote down words like ‘ornament’ and ‘Missouri’. I had a Lamy pen to write sideways, slantwise, of my other life. There was one club in particular where I excelled in the art of other people’s music. What some call karaoke but I call languishing in melody, obsessively, falling apart in front of an audience. I was like the VHS girl-child in Aftersun butchering ‘Losing My Religion’ with such sweetness the whole resort goes silent. What talent had I for pitch or flourish? There was a column of white light above my head at all times which I imagined writing into, solemnly, a long list of my songs. The more they snared in my throat, the more they became me. The newspapers declared this behaviour ‘cheery perennial’ at the local, noted my penchant for particular martinis, the olive glow of the evening. Any evening, you could find me there in a sequin distress, picking my excess off the floor. I had this thing called a hem. It was the way my voice dropped. The way I gathered it up. Outside the club was a cottage garden, can you believe it, where I tended these purple flowers. I spritzed the last of my drinks across their wilted leaves and I murmured the inside scoop of each song, so only the flowers knew. Their growth was writing itself all over the skirts of the club, I was feeding it; soon we would nourish ourselves from the fruits of trial and error. It seemed appalling that my whole generation had fallen back into the habit of other people’s songs. As a child, I was dragged along to open mics, and all the songs were original, weren’t they? You had to put a few coins in the kitty to get on the list. According to the principle of locality, a particle is influenced by its closest surroundings, with interactions limited to the speed of light. But according to Bell, there are variables. The risk of being heckled or worse, adored. I knew my theory of the song to be incomplete and quantum. It went very far. I stroked the rare blue hue of my partial shade. I queued Outside. Sung the non-lexical vocables of glossy stars. Ate lyrics for kicks. I paid the price.

Albums of the Year 2022

Alex G – God Save the Animals

Angel Olsen – Big Time

Beach House – Once Twice Melody

Beth Orton, Weather Alive

The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field

Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You

Björk – Fossora

Charli XCX – Crash

death’s dynamic shroud – The Lunar Curtain

FKA twigs – Caprisongs

HAAi – Baby, We’re Ascending

Jenny Hval – Classic Objects

Katie Dey – forever music

Mallrat – Butterfly Blue

Mitski – Laurel Hell

Organ Tapes – 唱着那无人问津的歌谣 / Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao

Porridge Radio – Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladders to the Sky

Regina Spektor – Home, before and after

Rosalía – Motomami

Savage Mansion – Golden Mountain, Here I Come

The 1975 – Being Funny in a Foreign Language

Warpaint – Radiate Like This

The Weeknd – Dawn FM

Weyes Blood – And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow

Yeule – Glitch Princess

~

Previous lists: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

12/09/1998

I began life calloused on the thumb of the family. All my life I ate chalk. My first memory was volunteering the date in class. “It’s the 12th September miss”. What’s the year? They made me stand up to write it. That morning a bee had stung me behind the knee, in that very soft spot, and I hadn’t told anyone. I winced and limped to the board and wrote 12/09/1998. It was the summer the ash tree was felled and then the oak, and we all made nests from the heaps of cut grass and I tried not to cry when scolded for grass stains, my skirt too short, my sting. Did I not understand the task at hand? You need to help the boys beside you, they said, when you’re finished your work there’s always more to be done. I wanted to be done with it all at once, and to never do it again and bask in the slow, drawn-out time of my earned oblivion. Then I discovered coffee and had all these memories rushing to the loch where I learned the name of a baby swan, a cygnet, which sounded like a form of jewellery or grammar. “That bread has stones in it”, I would say when presented with brown slices of something seeded. Throw it all to the swans. The mothers did not know what to do with me. I would not eat the slabs of pink trembling on dinner plates, so I ate the sleepover candy, all of it, and slept through the films, the first to want to sleep in their company. The mothers were vicious with hairbrushes. Do you know what happened that day in 1998? I licked white powder off my forefinger, then my green thumb. I felt funny. Under the table, the boys showed me their easy-peelers, their cigarettes, their rusty little knives. Somebody telling me to focus. To stop. At any moment, I’d feel the ash, the wax, the writing all over me. I was in the birdshit deep in the loch, my sediment; I was a lot of work.

Who do you envy?

Those who climb trees with such dexterity as to know how the vertical itself is a kind of knowing. The up-and-down world of clamping fingers and knowing what manner of pressure to apply to manage to hold. I want access to that but I come up against some limit in who I am. A sportsperson would hum in mine ears to try harder. Try to be better is a motto I’ll go with, thanks to a certain poet, but it doesn’t work with sports so much as an ethics for life. Wait. I had this leg on the walls of the world and all it really took was your sweet voice telling me there was a hold. A purple one, a yellow one. Just go for it. A spokesperson would yell in mine ears on behalf of surfaces: it’s going to be alright. I saw videos on the internet of climbers surpassing that moment of freeze to do something amazing like haul their bodies sideways, jump horizontally across the limit, and the thaw on their faces as they landed splat triumphant on the mat. One time another man landed on top of me, I let out a little squeal. It was deliriously exciting. I still have the scar. A rock song. All of the holds became rocks in themselves. You had to find a way to speak to them. If I do this with my fingers, if I really push, if my core could hold out longer for hovering. Suddenly it wasn’t about getting to any top or topping the wall or making that tap of completion. I wanted to find good places to literally hang out, my body a sort of hesitant dying leaf, relishing this thanatos in departing the life-giving branch. My nerve damage screamed in the rigid day. In the cafe with too-hot soup my sap bleeding out meant everything. I have envy for the strength of limbs in those who have earned it, their elastic ecstasies. In my dreams I hung upside down from trees, the frames of swings, the scaffolds of my dilapidated neighbourhood. My hovering grew powerful with longing for motion and soon I would strike a leg up, feel lusty for the whiteout snow beyond summit. Currently, the hardest climb in the world is called ‘Silence’. As I write this, condensation drips from the inside of my window panes, waters the baby aloes, drips like a cat lapping water. I watch a perfect lunar kitten suckle your fingers. The first nourishment. We can’t insulate the thought of my life. I put up my right hand higher than god and clutch.