Grapevine

Technology is harvesting our attention away from each other. We all have a “Grapevine” entwined around our past with unresolved wounds and pain. 

— Natalie Mering

Of course, the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world are one.

— Catherine Malabou

Morning brings indigo gluttony of the night’s dim prizes. I remember a night in February of 2019, the brightest stars in my life we saw above a kirkyard eating chocolate for all the stars. Looking for tickets to see you again, star stuff for popcorn synecdoche of eating the bones of what you believe at the movies, infinity pool, the liminal alimony of the heart you have. I pay it all back which is why skylines exist. At this time of year, we make our own light. I text you all day and all night the text pings resonate without me, though I’m still conscious. This is how I listen to music. Harvest the ricochets until my synapse nozzles are ripe and sweet.

“It’s too difficult” 

the beautiful song in my ear
The Butterfly splitfin will go extinct this year 

“My plastic girlhood obligatory 
wrote a novel you’d never know
elemental love for the noise of horses” 

Electra pastel of giving the lecture

Its voice never falters

Spotify should hire poets to replace the algorithm with iambs

A perfect way to respond?

The album cover of Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow features a glowing heart which is the idiosyncrasy of love song, gentle and melodic and good and wrong. There is something we say at breakfast about the inexplicable intimacy of an interval, this bit in the song where the chords do this or that and suddenly your heart’s aflutter. Why is that? I feel vulnerable and unclasped by music like the locket of a promise necklace snapped open, opulent. When are you gonna feel okay? 

I like it best when I don’t expect it.

/

Designing the conditions for crying is easy these days. A tiny fly lands on my wet nail polish and departs as lavender.

I used to wander the abandoned golf course and around the monument to see the snowcapped hills and feel it. 

Perished by screaming clouds in my brain.

I am in love with the music of Weyes Blood, we share the same birthday. 

At a recent gig the singer said “thank you all for being alive”. Some people describe these songs as hymns. Last year in the climate rush of COP26 I was cycling around with my bones on fire and freezing. I would show up to the job being stared at, horrible mess of myself couldn’t hide, what do you think of this poem I said it’s a lot to unpack. Why don’t we leave those tools in the box? He says toolbox isn’t so bad. You could just improvise. I don’t look to these men to be mentors but menthols were my first cigarettes, a clothing brand called MEN is like SHEIN you could have MENOUT or menagerie, mispronounced as shine, a giraffe made of glass or a tiny glass seal with whiskers of onyx, weeping. MELATONIN or MENACING, MENDACITY / my avuncular muses of more money have outraged, they will never understand candida. A spanner in the works. No more lies. I’m most men when in lingerie maybe or styling my old surprise, the giant window in a dream wouldn’t close after I’d opened it so I had to go looking for a man to help me, high-vis or high waters our time would come to close it, not until I had escaped. Fled is that happiness. Look at it hardcore. No more lies, no more dying. Your arms in the air.

I heard catastrophe on the grapevine which was snipping guitar strings all the better to hear the lyre underneath, the union makes us strong, picket-cold and trellises our kitten hearts are growing, Natalie as in a new flower or the Minecraft roses coming up fast this year to be eaten by the dreams of spiders. Nicky Melville poem says if you’re a soft person you just get squashed, Sarah once read it aloud at the picket. I pictured a soft orange in the principal’s pocket. Roses last forever even when past their superlative. Shedding their petals to cover our eyes. Bunny put them in cubes to exhibit. Smooth wax skin.

Violet roses.

Ever since my friend with the purple aura died I’ve worn so much purple to find a flame of them, purple flame of my Raynaud’s and holy flux of traumas. What’s the point of poetry, it’s purple. I lilac therefore I lamb. I am on the lamb, I am lambing seasons, turn me into a leaf on the riptide, for I am lost. The clouds are glamorous, in pursuit of beauty’s excreta, a bad era, the best

negentropy saves us from losing everything

Secret blue note.

Wine-dark reverie of the quiet escapade, my late heart 
blooms for the red, the read receipt 
staining your tongue. 

Catherine Malabou says ‘The body becomes worthy of philosophical examination when it is no longer a question of the body but of my body’. Descartes dripping wax on his robes, a lecturer pouring a pan of boiling pasta over his hand in rehearsal; the red welts between two moments, my horrible bleeding thumb. Scarlet clustering of old blood. Say it feels personal, say it is orange or purple. When it started inside me I felt the glow in my chest handed down by hyleticism of data from song: the body electric or incarnate. Menstrual tripping, I saw Kate Winslet literally on fire in fantasy after watching Romance & Cigarettes but she was invincible, what’s this script, literally the fire coming out of her in waves was my love of music. I harboured desires to stub cigarettes out on the wrists of saplings, light them and throw them barely smoked on the street; imagine my child self, scurrying around to collect them, smoking wholeheartedly the barely unsmouldered, especially rose ones. Lemonade’s infinity sunflower. I was so guilty in my treehouse for getting high, higher, highest of them all to bioluminesce in lieu of sunsets, fuck it. The cruelty displayed to our cousins was a lonesome one. What’s that word for when a word is hinged between two things, like flesh stitches that keep skin together and then dissolve inside you — a word that makes sentences make sense in this precious knitted way. What’s Latin. 

Butterfly notifications in my dopamine receptors.

Coffee luxuriance and pillowslips ink-stained with diary slumbering. There are too many images trying to bed us. A stage whisper for the saints. I was born from a chrysalis of synths swaddled in melody all the better to tell you. 

The discourse is banana-bruised and overly ripe in your bag.

Perfect oracle rosehip tea.

You can’t fully vanquish chaos but 
on the phone
at a planetary scale 
your mouth an aquarium, spilling numbers.

It’s okay that I died, and you died a little bit that night
we all did, really.

A friend is on the phone trying to renew medication. The record-breaking temperatures have lost their meaning, as in a lost glom of mercury swallowed by me. The Butterfly splitfin is in jeopardy. I have never fixed on a form for these cramps in language. The males intensify in colour when excited. The young are entirely silvery. I want to go on the profiles of the gentle ones and swim with them; you don’t need these comments, you didn’t need these things. The internship of being elegant more insect is fading. At some point

I wanted to drive. I was a girl toy and thought of many plastic cassette cases filling up the doors, the backseats with sugar. The idea of analogue as shadow, scrolling magnetic and stopping. I’m glitched by the ache which is lightening, gloss, disquietude, gelid. Girl drivers filling the roads, pouring concrete from their jars of face creams into the sea and beckoning 

to make love on the white lines, almost drifting

you were there, you were swimming, 

our worlds elided

I wanted to drive you to the sea cliffs of skyward to breakfast on blue. 

Natalie and Lana sing of the body California incarnate, plasticity glowing emails,
eyeshadow blue as in Bowie

my exospore of the hokum knowhow, excessive sentiment, hearts aglow

That house over there. That home over there. A palm. Analgesia of the sea.

Ghost for your thot

organology of a negative situationship

Catharsis polaroid still develops in my purse of us, you’re blowing out blue smoke in the dream, I’m bowing out. The eye emoji, heart stun soft mote. 

And in the darkness…

It’s good to be soft when they push you down

[…]

Such a curse to be so hard

Lightning bolt award for being born at all.

I used to chew beads and often swallow them

C. said so inside you it’s like the anthropocene

many plastiglomerate organ marias 

menstruating rainbows

What someone called my emotional Teflon was melted by your white-hot non-logic, almost like heroin of the pain I was in, as if to have a little blister polishing her oysters. Why is there no word for girl-come

or the tragedy of icepacks.

Kept panic-crying at the idea of sleeping

and did it until the blood vessels burst around my eyes 

which are sea-coloured and colourless, unseeing.

Divine & oversized teardrop:

I bought this not on etsy but via the estuary, quartz time, I dreamt a skipped ad and heard myself in the rearview mirror bound in leather. Here is a lilac wine and the name of that bone in your chest, flagrant sternum of the lonely highway, pulling your jacket to keep warm

picking pearls off your shoulders, all the better to lick this neck

in the flesh of the road

Bernard Stiegler says the relation entropy/negentropy is really the question of life par excellence

a pair of glowing red eyes

Buying more dreams at the pharmacy

of lurid blue

your poor wee cold sore

sky porn falls into humming. It’s free, it has to be. 

Anything lost at the point of service.

There’s so much I wanna say about this album

holding me tight

I wanna tie the lights

and go off to hear it shimmering beneath the moon, whose memory 

bruises 

rosemary

real blood from your forehead

and the shadow of the one who 

was yours

a long plague 

season of neutral sensation

new motor neurons at the cosmic dawn

tripping cured my parosmia somewhat I could smell sauerkraut, frying onions, coffee, kerosene my only name the body odour of the shadow you loved 

I can’t tell the trees from the shape of lightning

in subtitles

spiralise my love for the seventies 

in edible language

flares in the highlands

the problem is not being affectless

but totally loving too much

all the tautology of stardust

let’s take the motorway route to ride our souls 

under sunblock and metal sculpture

you feel balmy here, less exposed, fear of 

merging

what we are

white hot collision

emotional whiplash

Emerging triumphant the dawn is a fog machine it is only October, none of us a sweetheart neckline could finish the sentence 

swishing our way to ceremony

music makes sense

instead: a down & dirty musical set in the world of italicised starlings

which are assholes

because of radiance

for the love of original mud which connotes the whole story

they had to take flight

The body of both selves is ochre like in Husserl the real world is everything

a dialectician of starlight

Morning gluttony. Grasping. A worm in your blessing

fragile apples on the counter / collect to rot.

The real era was gradient and dependent on what Merleau-Ponty calls illness, ‘a complete form of existence’. I lost a normal form but what I found was the shimmer conundrum of the shape of you, California, a rice harvest of shiny red-blue tears to grow a purple flower, you guessed it. 

Possession. 

Pearly beads, the slasher heartfire of a bold new vision 

touching me soft jealous of cornfields

Hellbound in egress, dark glow, December’s acupuncture of clouds. 

How can something so big feel so cosy?

The creature is god.

Told myself I’d scrub mould from the bathroom today. Flux glow from the dirt that is given us to know the worst.

A given thing: music is grieving.

I wrap the vine around me in the hope of fruiting, or any violet outcome is fine. You bake a good pastiche like an electric goddess, cancelling plans all the better to scream at the stars. 
Loop trope. 
Hold yourself soft or hard, by the collar or hand, by moonlight
tripping in Finnieston
and in Yorkhill and by the masticated night 
which is always online 
in the digest of even the worst
‘The Flower Called Nowhere’

Mothering the subgenre of oblong buildings, bliss our heart this hurt. You essay your way to music but is it not your allergies that crystallise accomplice to the throat of time? Thank you, thank you for the mystery. It’s so late.

And we love this crescent moon 

for all intelligence is the art of rupture

Falling asleep at the movies 

And I am choking for a sweetness that really sees me.

~

Some italics are lyrics taken from Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow (2022).

Recycling the Repository

Recycling the Repository:

A workshop exploring Strathprints through creative practice with Dr Maria Sledmere (School of Humanities)
& Dr Karen Veitch (Scholarly Publications and Research Data).

Was really fun jumping into the Strathclyde repository on Monday with Karen and students from across the university. The whole worksheet accompanying the workshop is now available open access via Strathprints. We looked at the relationship between open access and open forms, ecopoetics and recomposition, collage, cut-up, erasures and wildcards – with examples from Chloë Proctor, Caleb Parkin, Caroline Bergvall, Kendrick Loo and others.

Access the worksheet

Upcoming poetry events: November

If you’re in Glasgow don’t miss these two poetry events I’m cohosting, happening very soon!

21st November 

poetry! with Mendoza, Peter Manson, Vik Shirley, Fred Carter

University of Glasgow, 6pm

22nd November

Launch Party: Brilliant Vibrating Interface 

(with SPAM Press and the Edwin Morgan Trust)

The Alchemy Experiment, Byres Road, 7pm

with Elle Nash, Aischa Daughtery, Romy Danielewicz, Isaac Harris, Chris Timmins

>> More info <<

Visions & Feed preorder

£10.99

Coming December 2022 with HVTN Press

Visions & Feed is a collection that spans over two years of work brought together under the mirror phase of an anthropocene lyric filtered through crises of femininity, disordered eating, dysmorphia, labour and loss.

Sledmere asks: what does it mean to be a body in one of many dying worlds, what forms of work are done to endure it, what desires and pleasures are still possible and which are breaking down? Adopting playful and associative registers of ascent, while exploring devotion, metabolism, magic, domesticity and the ambience of dream forms, this is an intimate poetics of song and hormone, isolation and longing, fashion and pop, colour and vision in the saturated live feed of post-internet lyric. Amidst the reverb of climate melancholia and oestrogen blues, the speakers of Visions & Feed morph between depth and surface, film and music, myth and play to weather the days. Between epistolary, elegiac, confessional, ekphrastic, prose-poetic, processual, discursive and long-form cascades, the book offers iterative, experimental and fractal modes for exploring ecological entanglement within daily life.

PREORDER NOW 🙂

This is my second full-length collection, following 2021’s The Luna Erratum. Many of these poems were written during lockdown or in the stretch of long afternoons at the tail end of big critical work that had occupied me for several years. I was immersed in dream and the idea of symbolic disclosure in poetry, lyrical shatterings and seeing oneself forever through glass, never clearly. Through a glass redly, purply, wrong. It begins with an epigraph from Maggie O’Sullivan’s Palace of Reptiles (2003): ‘A glazier walks through the earth calling the ruins strapped / on his back an angel’. How can poetry fit ruins into any transcendent firmament when the shards are still stuck in its back? I was admiring the glazier from afar wanting him to fix me. Suzanna Slack writes in The Shedding (2022) of ‘trying to have angel surgery’. In this book, my speaker seems to want a stomach replaced by clouds and to rain forever, why is that? I was born in a lightning storm with a lilac tongue and ate the suns like smarties. Fine. Very mild, even warm. To become glint in general felicity. Giving a zoo charm. Zooming.

Solids

Corpuscles spit constantly from the idea of sleep so I begin to fear it. Blood in the morning, metallic taste, no sweetness left from the Corsodyl but we try. Bits of shared housing make their way into my art, particulate matters: the gunshots pop pop, just fireworks; the neighbourhood yaptastic chihuahua called Barry; the pyrotechnics of teenage boozing which take place at the end of my street. A fully red tracksuit, a purple tracksuit, a secret shop which sells brownies laced with weed. Brown paper parcels with rips in them. Which Christmas ruined everything. Clicking dream materials of remembering scent, coming out with bundles of abundant orchids. Impossible for them to flourish here. Yet I coruscate brightly as if after surgery. If I could work with the wallpaper swirls in my dreams I would

put them into comets, then sentences.

Explosives can fire in space. They can’t disperse a tornado. In the hands of amateurs, the fireworks emit more smoke than is desirable. I go out to the smoke-laced cold and see a glow belonging to the moment I want. It’s over there. It’s so close.

Tomorrow’s a needle in my arm.

Tinnitus is the sound of the universe.

Mush

Bataille wrote ‘affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or a spit’. Losing the self in formlessness is ‘in common with erotic perversion’ and also ‘death’. I’ve always wondered what it felt like to have a galaxy embrace you. All the buried stars popping off underground where your meadow is a whole erogenous zone. Swish the mint wash around my mouth and spit. Blood. Sky stuff. 

O how I’d love to swallow wholly and be done with something, star self, in its millions. 

Bataille: ‘I propose to admit, as a law, that human beings are only united with each other through rents or wounds; this notion has, in itself, a certain logical force. If elements are put together to form a whole, this can easily happen when each one loses, through a rip in its integrity, a part of its own being, which goes to benefit the communal being’.

Open wide?

Our toothaches in sync and the sky gone down, its scroll won’t work. Clouds clot rain in our gums, I feel sorry for them.

What do I owe you?

Haven’t eaten anything crunchy and good for several weeks, I’ve lost count, there was that pizza at Little Italy that was the last good thing, dripping with goats cheese and artichokes. Formlessness. A gnarly tooth set back in your mouth, meaning something then the lack of it. We drank whisky where the doorman made me empty my huge bag and explain what Marxism was. I let alcohol numb my jaw and stumbled, I was upstairs, sleep weeping in lieu of sleep in a bed, in a travel lodge imagining myself like Sean said to be a larva in a honey colony.

Growing especially acquainted with mush again, less wisdom, I develop fresh desires for attachment. I’m baby for a while, wanting. Scrambled egg, porridge, cherry kefir, refried beans, applesauce, marmalade for no reason, chocolate ice cream, melted cheese, lentil soup, sweet potato, oat milk. Mush has sentience. In your mouth you have its true formlessness and you become one with it. Literally the last few days I’m scrambled, soupy, result of melt. I wanted to be licked thoroughly to nothingness, just this sweetness at the back of your throat.

Jealous of hard edges, hipbones, infrastructure.

Happy Cunny October.

Dentist with claws in my dreams, dentist with dog food in a bowl for me, dentist with a very tall pylon, dentist with a sabre the length of god.

Spider in my shower, spider tattooing itself to my nail, spider has form. Style. Spider in each of my eyes.

Redistribute anything of meat that remains. Bataille wrote of eruptions, necessary expenditures, ‘laceration’. No more content.

You must let the blood clot. No coffee for five days. 

Poetics of mush: reduce itself down, a sauce made with the juices released from thought. Tasty essences and tastelessness itself. V Covidian feeling: the only taste is mould, garlic, capers. Salting my kale. You said something.

It hurts to smile! 


~

Bataille, Georges, 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. by Allan Stoekl, trans. by Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Upcoming events

Some of the lineups for these are tbc or you can follow the links for more info 🙂

Cherry Nightshade

A new pamphlet written in the ardent chaos of this spring, commissioned and published by Owen Fortunato Brakspear of slub press.

🥀

In the night, there is a garden. 
It is night, which overfloweth. 
Strange vines begin girdling the old lamp posts and the wrought iron fences, intertwining with ivy, with passion flower, and the nodding hellebore. This irenic incandescence overcomes the cinerescent, and the wee small hours become you in the hypnagogic glow of the only childhood left to you. Dreams of That which is still possible… 
there you stand, so much smaller now, beneath the Cherry Nightshade……..

🍒 🌚 

£8

Riso-printed by Earthbound Press on A5

53pp.

To order, click here.

fall vibe ’22

  • e-bikes 
  • insomnia 
  • auto belay 
  • protein oat flapjacks
  • oversized trainers
  • ragged cuticles 
  • kohl in general
  • murmurations
  • secret stick n pokes
  • the silver foil inside crisp packets
  • smell of shoe polish 
  • (sandy) alex g
  • high quality coloured pencils 
  • carbon stains on off-white garments
  • challah bread
  • lentil soup
  • excessive misspellings 
  • dissociative weeping
  • falling asleep with the light on
  • freshly-cut keys
  • corduroy
  • bath swoons with epsom salts 
  • the prose of Fanny Howe 
  • feldspar
  • lectures
  • one-off marlboro window smoke
  • ambiently watching sport 
  • whisky and soda 
  • The Commons
  • charismatic porcini
  • bleeding mascara
  • the movie 
  • vapours
  • horrible black tights 
  • cognitive aporia
  • barry m dazzle dust worn as highlighter
  • waiting lists 
  • cosy zoom 
  • forehead kisses
  • epistolary delays 
  • orange 
  • missed calls 
  • odyssey walks home
  • thigh highs
  • sonnets 
  • mortal dysphorias 
  • wet leather 
  • butterfly heart rate