colour – Page 2 – mariaology

(NEW PAMPHLET) Polychromatics

SNACK DROP!

A new pamphlet-length poem, ‘Polychromatics’, responding to the textile and ceramic work of Anna Winberg, is out now with Legitimate Snack (Broken Sleep Books).

Cashless, the snow fell in your dream
three million times osculation
of this surface once was grass, soft silhouette
in pink snow. I scoop masses
of this snow
to carry around for hours.

🍬🍭🌨️🎨🍬🍭🌨️🎨

Paper: Gmund Cotton Linen Cream (110gsm)
Cover: Pastel Pink (210gsm)
Endpaper: Pink Gold Vellum
Titles: Gravesend sans (Medium, 8pt)
Text: Mokoko (Regular, 8pt)
Thanks to Aaron Kent for gorgeous assembly & publication!

Order for £6 here.

Dear Town Square

Pokemon Let's Go Guide - In-Game Alolan Pokemon Trades - Just Push Start

Dear Town Square

My horse disappeared. I had contrived to love the rat
with cheats. Have you considered the ethos

To save your game, pluck acid out of the water;
is communism good code to love you

For bread? In summer I chose the orange grass
with yellow grass, the blue inedible magic flower.

In winter the white grass, blue grass of spring
a verdant seaweed and moondrop flower

Will you take me to school today? I want to learn
the inevitable lesson, in the law of spring/summer

Green-grass fashion, will you describe a toy
flower, sift me from hill, let grow?

I put the wild-grown light in my hunger
I put the coloured grass under soft expense.

I cantered hard across the dream salad
of somebody’s laughter, I lost you

Pinkcat, gathering these flowers afield
before I fell into clement spinach.

If hurricanes come, bless a watering can.
The rats will carry me gently

For every yield of our life, soft rain
the average shipping cost of corn and onion

Or a peach tree dies in the sun
as soon as we receive the foiled mushroom.

(NEW BOOK) Sonnets for Hooch: Lemon Bloom Season

***Sonnets for Hooch: Lemon Bloom Season***
Mau Baiocco // Kyle Lovell // Maria Sledmere
[*56 pp.* // A5 // *Perfect-bound* // *Run of 100* // *17/04/202*1]

Announcing the first of four seasonal pamphlets of sonnets, written in collaboration with Mau Baiocco and Kyle Lovell.

Available to order now at £6 inc. UK P&P.

Praise for Lemon Bloom Season

Like a liquid prisoner pent in glass, I once thought the sum total of human ingenuity was Fanta Grape. And then I read this collection, the perfect expression of what it means to write your poems in the mouths of your friends (as I think Derrida said). You know the part of a poem that stays at the bottom of the bottle, collects as crystallising residue? If you read these poems out loud for long enough, the sounds train your tongue to flicker in there like a lizard and the why of the world just fizzes and melts.

– Colin Herd, author of You Name It (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019)

Of all sciences, is our Hooch poet found at the highest. For they doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any person to enter into it; nay, they doth as if your journey should lie through a fair orchard—at the very first give you a cluster of lemons that, full of that taste, you may long to pass further.

– Sir Philip Sidney, author of An Apology for Poetry

When put to our focus group, seven out of nine consumers agreed that the tasting notes for Lemon Bloom Season were long, smooth, and ‘distinctively yellow in its language’. One consumer attempted to quote Roland Barthes. Another consumer attempted to put forward a new theory of ‘Bitter Poetics’, before being given some more Lemon Bloom Season sonnets. Everyone was glad.

– Philomena Zest, SMOOCH™ CEO

Playlist from Hooch Launch Party

Sample Poems

Playlist: March 2021

musk wish

the orange in the middle of daffodils was a song and when I saw you thru the blossom portal say all is well, you weren’t saying much but when I saw you thru the well with pennies, when I threw in the well my pennies well are they heavy? I made a wish on the topic of better, getting light or better, patterns on the vase aren’t like pollution or lightning storm at the top of Blythe Hill, but I noticed the temperature in California is 26 degrees right now

is it always the mild wet winter of narco swing and blithely fixing your bike to be rare in comparison, zero rate exempt from tending the flowers. I want to be a raw kind of feeling you peel me from bed I am become rosemary or behind the wall is a spring it gives, who delivers, there is pollen to breathe or not to believe I am warm dry summer as a mattress tastes of

wanting to embody the reading, its sweat I listen back, the baroque life of water, agua viva and what cherished of haunting, not this, or more classical forms behold, memory dream on the back of march and not taking the air for granted, blisters and songs I would listen to what if I just get sick what if I am nausea after all

reality I have a cheat code for bearing the rain like Proust didn’t have to, I hate food, what name do you give these creases, I am less than and tenderly to live in grey now where seagulls are more specific or can you say a herring gull lands on my arm at night or the formerly known as movement

alights at the scene where you ask for more sauerkraut please, let’s pull over, at the very least did we come here shining delete the bell is a girl or rind or grapefruit or very becoming after word marvellous today is beautiful about today it wanted to change our lives but who would assemble that statement, not for police who look in the beehives but scintillation is like, everywhere we study of illumined tinnitus, toothache, their white light crushes but did I establish

taking the painkillers of chefs, being squeezed out of the area, I dream a fat free cottage for sale and is it your birthday I’m scared of the sound of bluetooth the bad grammar of science daily the refutations of rainfall where your city is better, blood-soft atmospheric I’m simmering gnocchi as we speak

the mile-deep plants beneath the ice of Greenland, birds-eye, closing the door, I fall for the novel corona warm salmon it is a cold-water wisdom dish in the arctic sponge cake taking my place off

the flowers! you held them outside the shut nightclub and from subatomic world you were lovely? I remember the irl as like endless page refresh not knowing which leaf would shake first or press water to go back, up, the ana-cathartic condition of touching my spine obsidian, you know everything

as some of us are in the gutter some of us are looking at mars I’m looking at you elongated and some of us wear musks of various species like white black or red musks my favourite is the red offering and to wear it with chilli tobacco and smoke out my window to spicy clouds will only work in lockdown

like forgetting to mute in shrine of noise be sufficiently cooked thru a planet does taste like the species of a sex of deer is it tender or am I to make this with butter and yellow as yellow does a lot for itself for orange and musky everyone

unlock with your face, where is nautical the ID

I want to know twilight

black midi – John L

Aphex Twin – Acrid Avid Jam Shred

Felicia Atkinson – Lighter Than Aluminium

Yellow Swans – Limited Space

Lee Gamble – Locked In

Aïsha Devi – Mavda

Porridge Radio – Pop Song (Clarence Clarity remix)

NNAMDÏ – ART SCHOOL CRUSH

illuminati hotties – melatonezone

Remember Sports – Tiny Planets

Kississippi – Indigo

Savage Mansion – Wig Wise

Squid – Paddling

Dry Cleaning – Oblivion (Grimes cover)

Jinosaur Jr. – I Ran Away

Indigo Sparke – The Day I Drove the Car Around the Block

Fugazi – Afterthought

Drop Nineteens – The Dead

Playlist: October 2020

Listen for exits

For a brief eternity, nobody was fucking anything that already got fucked and that was when the leaf started falling & another then a whole earnestness of them. Fuck. The way to keep strong is being meticulous about noticing clouds and writing shit down I stopped wanting to rain, I’ll fall asleep smoking. I’ll fall asleep smoking in some movie where my brogues are black as the wet night this all was conceived, draw my red curtains away from the moon that Nasa had a claim on and think about salad days, my nails painted trademark Billie Eilish lime. O salad days pacing restaurants, the rain is on; I remember the leaves swept in the door and they too were victims of a fate in their genes, once green. So I took samples and pressed them crisp between Moleskine pages in the sleep dimension, my writing was automatic and sullen, chlorophyllic, squeezed between menus, I was windswept inside it with the beach pouring out it was heavy. File this under the brush, bush, brush it back into language. I listened to the intricate complaints of the shrubs.

Between myriad Tuesdays, I became a psychiatrist of seashells, pressed to my ears their exquisite misery.

Time was a month of afternoons and then rivers of weeks and the sexual appetite of the hours then none. M. said in emails it all feels like soup. In no time I drink echinacea tea and wait for you in black velvet trousers, my pretzel crossed legs. The black velvet night is missing from other suns. There is no time. My chest is clearing itself of the leaves and a mysterious spore they call viral but is it just metaphor, is it the just continuum of falsehood, heavy as my tongue in your words and letting the owls out is only fake news. A black velvet night full of owls. The way to keep going is smoking at the window notwithstanding the smoke, I mean lean out like me and catch it. Someone drops loneliness pills from high windows, highest, like the song about throwing pieces out a twenty-storey flat…Your browser does not currently recognise any of the video formats available. And yet that song and for the love of bread and jam and here in our crumbling houses. Seedless. My brother does not understand tenement lust, the trend for it, but a tower-block remains in our town. Black velvet surrounds us, slapped between lunar slices cut from the nightmare of twenty-twenty. It isn’t your vision.

At five, he would drink all day diluted wine and snort at jellied nature. I love receiving your comments and photos and learning what is an amethyst deceiver and those in history who wanted us killed. If I am held down by world, I had a cold shower and lived in the hades of a woodlands that didn’t belong to me. Smell of tomato all summer in the glow of my window. Smash it all over your clavicles, the insides of your thighs, between your toes, the secrecy of your neck. Flesh of a very red vitamin C. Imagine owning the woodlands. Not to eat, I typeset all night to the sound of sentences, insects, let them lay me down later, I am all this humming snow. What sleep is it that comes three hours at a time, at a time without time that is never quite dark and five hours late. If the clocks go back. You say it’s impossible to write in these times and you are right, as anyone is to say of the impossible I feel it, here and closing in and peeling the skin from my cuticles. Not this. Backwards. When you ask what I’m doing, I’m quietly bleeding. In the hazard assessment, failing to be meticulous is not this. Failing violence. Touching green. I have a good kick at the heart and the head. The men are all down. Held down. You and I get so tired.

I want to know how she dies before the novel even opens. Lain down in the grass; the spine is split, our folds are torn. Because you say nothing I go into the orange department and juice my feelings very slowly in rapture. Waking up is to know not what happened. A blade is working in spiral formation – a blade tornado. What would rip us from orange and up, up to our tower block office at home? Dream pith all over the air around us, sticks. Walter Benjamin is very anxious about this, that you should not write dreams down before breakfast, should not attempt to narrate them. You break fast to break with your dreams. I dreamt I wrote copy for an orange juice company, who wanted their ingredients relayed as sonnets. It seemed impossible that orange juice should be so teeming with things other than oranges. The names were beautiful: canola oil, sodium citrate, beta carotene, cellulose, sucralose, Neotame, potassium sorbate, yellow #5, yellow #6 – and what could be seven? What could be less than seven! We are, we are…In the mix, at the end of the nineties, “soft drink turned a girl yellow.” I remember this as though I had been in hospital and the walls were all yellow for how much I stared at the pale and acceptable middle-class blue. Where was this, surely not in the news. I paint my eyes girl yellow, the colour of soft ghosts; I practice quietude, then sugary schemes of rhyme.

So what is the meaning of soft in your work, is it ordinary eggshells around the thing itself, is it orange peel, goldfish, autumn maple. I tread lightly on the question of being at all. These terms are so loaded. K. is reading novels where people casually set off fireworks, they do it all the time: they grab them from supermarket bins and set them off in the carpark because why would you wait. A catherine wheel for Asda and my blues is spinning, my blues in the washing machine, O rocket, a felt sense I could hug you then and the blues left a stain on the radiator. Dashes sparkle. We sit in old meadow in mud and the dogs roll over each other. We are not drinking cocktails. The transience of dalmations. What is the meaning of soft. Softness as a kind of value. I wish I could learn precision in language but it goes running over my senses and to be soft is to experience aphasia. Say in the meeting we stammer and get to the question, late morning before this, zoom before zoom, arranging the clattering scale weights and spices. I slept with Bachmann’s Malina under my bed. A blue skirt stain on the radiator. Blue heat rises. Dad says, “have you been listening to seashells again?” I fantasise gas flames.

Conch, scotch bonnet, wentletrap, simnia, drill and murex. Rose and sharp-rib, American carrier, Gulf oyster. Marmite mushrooms frying on the stove. You know there is a shell called ‘Coffee bean trivia’. In Brighton you could buy trays of them for a fiver. I bought Guinness instead, a half pint for you and I on the last hot day of the year. There was a kind of listening to sunlight. Softness as what could be damaged inside us: organ spleen, aura lamina, the shell of our bodies. Your cells soft mint as the cure. People are cycling to work; I barely leave my sofa. Various adrenalines assemble inside us. So far the shells have daddy issues because of the sea. Scrub hard and anything shines. I am under the influence of rainbows, umbrellas, a rim of salt.

I was fired from the orange department for wearing this blue on my sleeve. In the atrium standing there with Styrofoam coffee, swished blue from my dreams; compliments from the manageress and frowning at the meeting that never would last, and something we didn’t say. ‘Divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions’, writes Jackie Wang. I sat outside Perch and Rest with lemongrass steaming from a cup I had purchased and the leaves blew into my face with rain, they were soft and important, licked and wet.

We were about to make love but one of us took concussion from the piece of citrine beneath my pillow.

I dreamt rabbits were climbing my beech tree the way goats do in Israel.

A small porcelain jug of milk, a blue jug, was all I could glean from the orange department, after my passing. Carried it home in cardboard, I passed through the walls. It is all because the clocks go back and a crack on the wall. Anhedonia, that I hold breadcrumbs and nothing left to imagine. At the late-night snack bar, composing these empty sentences. Do we get paid for the hour we lose? A soft wound is still a wound. “I would like truffle fries, I would like oysters…” This is something I once seriously wondered. Pools of oil in shells, a meltable system. You break crockery and throw it at the sun. It goes like fuck; it is fucking you brightly. There are still exits, listen.

Thee Oh Sees – Goodnight Baby

Little Comets – One Night in October

The Cure – Underneath the Stars

Oneohtrix Point Never – ECCOJAMC1

Moses Sumney – Neither/Nor

Massive Attack, Young Fathers – Voodoo in my Blood

Bicep – Apricots

Autechre – si00

HEALTH, 100 gecs – POWER FANTASY

Animal Collective – Bridge to Quiet

Pharoah Sanders – Astral Traveling

The Raincoats – Only Loved at Night

U.S. Girls – Velvet 4 Sale

Jenny Hval – Conceptual Romance

Tomberlin – Floor

Sharon Van Etten – Let Go

Julien Baker – Faith Healer

Julia Jacklin – CRY

Sun June – Karen O

Soccer Mommy – crawling in my skin

The Weather Station – Robber

Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders

Jason Molina – I’ll Be Here in the Morning

The Mountain Goats – Rat Queen

Bright Eyes – Miracle of Life

Admiral Fallow – Dead Against Smoking

Adrienne Lenker – heavy focus

Kevin Morby – Valley

Lana Del Rey – Let Me Love You Like a Woman

Four Tet – My Angel Rocks Back and Forth

Julie Byrne, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Love’s Refrain

Playlist: June 2020

The daylight was like ordering pyjamas off the internet. Light blue. Sky broke for when it rained and the hills were seen as old pornographers watching us pass like gifs. I’m grown into us to reach for the kettle, for the internet, wearing my silks, something’s on the boil and it’s not quite tea. I think of some other season and know it is cornflower, not quite light, not quite blue of dawn because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the dawn. People are buying vintage files to play dialup connection. The old pornographers eat their cameras for warmth. I’ve seen them do it to be secret, fucking careful to be made up in a lovely afternoon with blusher, oranges and Russian vodka. It’s the same thing you lie down for, sometimes lying down because I can’t get a word, or a line, can’t catch or watch. You have to watch it for happening. The daylight was like that, then pulling on silks, moth-fringed, light blue it was like the colour of the internet turned inverse for ‘its’ children. They were still making artillery in the system, so we could sleep here peacefully and not be disturbed by the old pornographers and their bits of camera. The sexual motion / of foliage all up in my software. It wasn’t that we had any tension, there were other kinds of ars poetica, but something’s on the boil and it’s not quite tea.

There were other kinds of daylight the colour of the internet and not the quite blue of this tea. Because sky is making us pass like gifs in such loops as I can’t get a word. The deteriorating resolution of you are not bloodleaf. Because June is super lovely, moth-fringed, pulling on silks. You pass a lot of grasses, long-grown from their natural habitats, watching the drops fall out of the sky for what, for love. I don’t know what shape it is they make on the surface of water, but I watch. The old pornographers were making a nature documentary at the edge of the forest, which was inaccessible, badly rendered. So I could sleep here peacefully, I came out of the shower in cornflower to tell them the best blue spots they could film. The colour of the internet is touching a liquid, then it goes through the lens, fucking slow, so huge, it belongs to this season. Snapped. The tree was just that down the middle, sort of bruised where it had stood, not light blue, lightening out into favourite tone. The old pornographers scolded my aura and told me these pretty white lies. Like. Say your best tree was a willow and we do it lightly, willowy, that’s how I know what tallness is, like pulling on silks in London. It’s the same thing because I can’t get a word, moth-fringed my mouth is pushing up cobwebs. (*) The loop is very beautiful it feels like you are grasses, lots of them exist unmown for hours, how at dawn for the children, light blue, how they enter and trample; only the old pornographers trespass for profit.

Here look at the tiny bird nursing her young which are tinier still, it’s the same thing as knowing it rained and a goldcrest buoyed up on the birdbath, tiny thing, not quite vodka. Because I can’t get a word, there are gilded flakes in my colourless tipple – visceral realists! – like anything we had off the internet, like this particulate stuff that fell from the sky. I want to be fucking careful to light blue the mise en scene of this feeling, tell it slow to flicker. Be made up in a lovely or a line, can’t catch or not be disturbed by the old pornographers, whose interns were cameo sylphs of such beauty as to even sleep peacefully here, or inhabit the air. It was like the dream of Bloomsbury and the supermodels draped over carts that advertised mustard to the masses and it made no sense except mustard can boost your metabolism maybe, yellow it is, so I ride my bike beside them. I’m grown into us to reach tension, summer thinspiration, I dawn because it’s been a long kind of daylight to find this, pulling on silks, dust caps, yolks, some time since the colour of the internet turned up bits of camera. The contact sheet of ruinous cornflowers, raindrops stained; pinned animals appear in separate parcels, how it all looks side by side is not quite vodka. It is yet a shard. Archival. I’ve seen them do it for happening. Warmth. Freedom is the edible mischief of knowing poetry could never. Warmth, warmth is keeping a secret, local to cygnet, melt & forestry slenderness. The daylight blusher made love of your face, I’m fucked.

Sun Ra – Realm of Lightning

Run the Jewels – yankee and the brave (ep. 4)

Spellling – Dirty Desert Dreams

Noname – Song 33

Fleetwood Mac – Storms

Laura Nyro – Broken Rainbow

Connie Converse – Sad Lady

Ratboys – A Vision

Big Star – Dream Lover

Bright Eyes – Mariana Trench

Coma Cinema – Tall Grass

Gleemer – Brush Back

Feng Suave – People Wither

Tricky – Fall Please

Let’s Eat Grandma – Glittering

Soko – Being Sad Is Not a Crime

HAIM – Gasoline

Kelly Lee Owens – On

Tomberlin – Tornado

Slowdive – Some Velvet Morning (cover)

Mogwai – Take Me Somewhere Nice

Bing & Ruth – The Pressure of this Water

Ecco2k – Hi Fever

Lil Peep – driveway

Ashnikko – Cry (feat. Grimes)

Donny Hathaway – I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know

deeper – Pink Showers

Katie Dey – Dancing

Christine & the Queens – People, I’ve been sad

Thurston Moore – Hashish

Ian & Sylvia – Early Morning Rain

Robert Wyatt – Shipbuilding

Soft Machine – Why Are We Sleeping?

The Replacements – Can’t Hardly Wait

Songs: Ohia – Didn’t It Rain

Kath Bloom, Loren Connors – Wait For My Love

Lianne La Havas – Weird Fishes (cover)

Phoebe Bridgers – I Know the End

Playlist: March 2020

Screenshot 2020-02-14 at 00.12.43.png

I dream I am driving, and the accident with tomatoes mattered less because I was going to slam myself, my assemblage of metal and flesh, quite deliriously into the tree. He once teased he was good at slamming. Before there was yesterday, I had watched you with the beef variety in the centre of the plate; how you held the knife quite close so the skin would almost burst, I held my breath. Red would split upon red, the tremble. Is it even red, this colour they ascribe to the fruit we always said was vegetal? Breakfast, another cut between my legs. Breakfast, the people who queue outside for their messages. Two metres apart, we exist at the opposite stems of each other.

To think of it now, my mind flowering as though on modafinil, recovering a single pollen of thought. It is this: I would crumble to every yellow you asked of us, sweeping me from your sunsets as nobody would dare come online.

As the plot develops, you are pushing the knife, really pushing it into the fruit. You are going quite steady, through the seed. I feel a warmth from the skin of the keys. You can’t go through with it; you drop the handle and check my pulse. We loll around, considering things. We are two lopped halves of the edible. I felt like Whitman, licking tomato juice from the knife of the man who doesn’t exist. Who made you a man? You could just as easily have been a sunflower, boy. We loll around, considering things; we sway in the wind that doesn’t exist. I want to be as sure as the land. The land outside is an area, and the area is X, it doesn’t exist.

who / that / it
pleases
to live

There are millions of infected tomatoes living right now on this planet. I find it triggering when someone pretends to count them. I set my alarm clock to March, knowing we’d even get back if we tried, if we were silent as we are. I cycled hard up the hill to meet this, dreaming the fruit upon my return.

The clocks go forward, stupid clocks!

Fiction makes us go places. All the signs said, for circumstances beyond our control—

Move you between ex and why.

I dream of a quarantine beside the sea. My brother is ordering luxury coffee, the air is good, I feel it stir in my chest. The air is time, but we can’t buy it. I leave fat tips with coins I can’t use. Why is it for ‘me’ or ‘us’ that the world exists? You took the single when you wanted the double. No, it is not that at all. We thank the people who serve us duly. You have served me the last bad song of myself.

‘Of crushed red tomatoes, you turn it down to just an orange glow’ (Bernadette Mayer, ‘Very Strong February’).

In lieu of my thesis, I kept making playlists. Which argument is it that would strangle the days, leave them to simmer

Then strangle the days to a blazing teal.

‘Something is going to happen’, writes Sartre in Nausea, ‘I see myself advancing with a sense of fatality’. It is our curse to be so viscously stuck to ourselves. I don’t know what that’s about, what any of this means. Imagine a laptop on top of a laptop. I am helpless in the form of a sentence. Why are my keys so warm, from what tip did we insufflate?

‘The Nausea isn’t inside me: I can feel it over there on the wall, on the braces, everywhere around me. It is one with the café, it is I who am inside it’ (Sartre, Nausea). There is no island from the virus, no Nature to look back, sashaying her endless oceans of hair, like the restaurant manager portrayed in a surly review on TripAdvisor. I am nauseous with a virus inside me I can’t even see. Maybe we are close to a birth with it. A long, interminable pregnancy.

The twang in my chest was a causal relation between ventricle rivers.

I feel trapped in the body inside my body. It’s always looking back.

A friend messages with the apology, ‘Still need to reply to you but my days have been frustratingly full of speaking at videos of other people speaking at a video of me and so on forever and ever’.

Can you adjust to the nausea? I drove a car very hard, knowing I could not drive the car, knowing it would end so badly and the creosote bushes would sing to me. I drive us back to the virtual diner, where you leave all the olives and sip a red scare.

The nausea comes in the form of abyss. It is good to hear you speaking, the lemon trees growing, your hair losing tone because of the days.

If people were chalking ‘We will be okay :-)’ on the riverside walkway, I would do a Ben Lerner, via Whitman, and pour sympathy out in paint: ‘I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is’. Do we know how anything is? I have been texting my nurse friends with everything and nothing to say. I cross bridges for no reason than burning it backwards. Could you say this to a river? Can fire kill a virus?

I project us backwards into the current, knowing the absence of voice would sweep me, swallow a flower. If we forget how to speak, if we get through this.

Tambourine canter.

Swallow a fruit.

On the other side, politics chokes.

One day, we will live post-email and lilac you sit on the sill of my window.

If I had a thing to say, it was not worth saying.
If I had a thing to say, it was not worth saying.

Something is going to happen. You spear the tomato, eventually, and it is so trivial.

I want to live in the blood that makes us so trivial, harvest my red, be less of love and more inside it.

Somebody I don’t know on Zoom is called upon to define their practice.

If you were never already in reach. ‘Distance is here the expression of a certain loss […] which is “losable” only insofar as it is within my horizon’ (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology). I watch other rituals on the feed, tomatoes conveying their life like sunsets, oozing Billie Holiday songs on a glitching sea.

Your former melancholy.

Darkside.

I want you to draw them.

I want you to draw them, very slowly

until every one is a baby.

And you make a baby of my tomato.

And you make it very strange.

And you give it as seed.

Sequined with topics.

These bundles of fatalist apples of love.

I sketch out the yellowest nets.

I should have sent no poems over the sea, I should have envisioned the breakfast of distance, I should have swam while I could.

I would like to arrive dishevelled / at the edge of things.

Smell of wild garlic in Pollok Park / you polish your shoes / I miss you.

So this is it that survives ‘you’:

‘The joyless, atrocious, sad “pleasure” is in the details of the suffering, in the suffering itself, in the taste you taste to the bottom where nothing forbids you to suffer, and each cruel dish, so relished, offers the heartbreaking pleasure of being able to feel.’
— Cixous, Dream I Tell You

When someone on twitter has already written, had lunch twice just to feel something.

‘In order to avoid saying “I,” the author eats incessantly’ (Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw).

My heart freaks out at your avatar. It happened again and I’m sorry.

stop_refreshing_the_news.pdf

Adding these smiles of coriander, you discover dawn’s vanity in the mouth of a crow. It is adding its cries to the plate of tomatoes. Such seasoning loses the seasons. I would drown you in oil / before you could make / the cut of my life.

Remember gigs
Remember green infinite days
Remember growing backwards
Remember gross affairs with inelegant consequence
Remember green & finite money
Remember glistening sheets
Remember guessing who would be there
Remember gestalt was a thing

And you make it very strange, this thing that will happen. Immensely belonging to no one. Her body a pyramid. Enter it.

Motionless, causing a solemn offence.

Outlook fails to open a page.

Something is waiting. Remember it green & infinite.

Easy for you to say of a fall. Feels spooky to have speed dial. No news is rhizome.

Catch you on zoom.

Hate us for saying it.

I adore us.

So trivial.

Sacred tomato, last supper,

cut me on cam. What do they look like?

You are yellow and red you are yellow and / red you are yellow and yellow and yellow.

Stereolab – Infinity Girl

TOPS – Colder & Closer

Deeper – The Knife

Ellis May – War on Territory

Porches – I Wanna Ride

Squid – Sludge

Thee Oh Sees – C

Porridge Radio – Pop Song

Catholic Action – Witness

Savage Mansion – Weird Country

Disq – Konichiwa Internet

Life Model – Saskia

DOPE LEMON – Streets of Your Town

Sufjan Stevens, Lowell Brams – What It Takes

Sharon Van Etten – Staring at a Mountain

Lucinda Williams – Sharp Cutting Wings

Broadcast – Lights Out

Half Waif – In August

Sun Glitters – UUnnrreeaall

Kelora – X24

Grimes – Delete Forever

Moses Sumney – Virile

The Weeknd – Hardest to Love

Minor Science – Spoken and Unspoken

DjRUM – Blue Violet

Princess Nokia – Gemini A COLORS SHOW

Laurel Halo – Zeljava

Brooke Bentham – Control

Good Good Blood – Sanctuary Mornings

Real Estate – Falling Down

stmartiins – Holly’s House

Ratboys – A Vision

Waxahatchee – Lilacs

The National – Never Tear Us Apart

Beth Orton – Blood Red River

Phoebe Bridgers – The Garden

Bright Eyes – Persona Non Grata

Playlist: November 2019

november 2019.jpg

The hall is full of noises, sounds of torrid airs and sigh. It is a steel hall, non-place, serving lusciousness in plastic cups. The animals sing on a loop. The choir just lifts. ‘The science is clear’ (Greta Thunberg). I stayed up waiting until the cries came, curled on my little sofa. It isn’t years that slip when she starts, when the young ones start, when the colour is like a radical hydro seminar. What do you have to contribute, I give you my silks just once, clutching a ticket. Can’t stop worrying the skin of my cuticles into a bleed, scrape the hard bit sore against my thumb. She just swirls. Something has shifted between us since. She moves she. Moveable she. I can’t start up.

Two of us drift in dresses, crushed of scarlet velvet.

It has been a long time since this was honeyed. I felt sultry like an Everly Brother, his actions speak louder. On the line standing and learning, the lines, I think it hurts.

In the poem I am clipping my nails again. Words, words, words; a snip.

How is it that we sat up late, same sofa, in the skeins of this year? Have you even come down yet?

His actions speak louder than shimmer_

Bliss not this, Christmas cactus at the corner of_. Is it better to cry in the sun or the rain. The rain is so obvious. I confected a dialogue to spite the blues and the cherries, rinsing packaging in the sink. It was supposed to be red. You said it fell flat. There was a half-moon curve between us and I sat there hugging my knees. The others. I like when you say you like a riff. Let’s be as I was in the hall, champagne later, tiniest bubbling; don’t say rise, let’s hold it cute. A sippable glitch in the music. Walking home in the rain, I murmured it: wtf wtf wtf. I made this punctuation; be here now, missing the body. She does this thing with her lips; teensy bubbles taste dust of gold & angel.

Watching your arms like a symphony, fucking—

Perhaps it is not about being at all, yet I am at the table and the hydrangeas are just too much. I wish there were Silk Cuts. Deathly attendant, where writing to you at the specific moment was standing in the flashbulb of a passing car and trying to look up at the stars. Just as the stars in the valley, we visit the shire. The stars you say are most particular, yet they are anyone’s; the stars are in the garden now, a proximate shrubbery and I put on my makeup. Deep bled fuchsia into sage and clary; yet we are violets, smelling the sea. And a dram before class, something citrine to start us, blendable night. I try it again; the word ‘frenetic’ peals from me.

If history was different, wouldn’t I be singing this.

Merry season helichrysum. There is a headpiece of corals worn by the sea. A quartet of angels play the flute-hoop and daylight twists, and Greta says it more than clearly. So hot this hurts. At current emissions. Someone in the back shouts FUCK THE TORIES and I put on my shoes. I wake up to my nails not coral-red, my eyes not pressed with cornflower blue. ‘if the word / does not arise it will fall back, the thing itself, it will fall again / into that ocean where it is not biodegradable’ (Beverly Dahlen, A Reading: 11-17). The thing of the word fell back into water, lots of it deep and luxury water. I wanted to say, the word has been waiting in shallow poetics. Floats of white. Water is a memory of the water before it. That feels like love but is that a falling. Into it, into it. That ocean speaks its chords again, thingly and falling. Dear degradable, non-bio daylight; sentiments of infrared, blip of foam.

I wanted to ask, are you striking, striking. The blood clots around the skin of our thumbs. Got lost in the rhythm I leave at the door / you painted helium blue. I knew it would bring me home to you. I was immediate, here, I knew what to do. This electric hand, hello.

What did you have to almost wake up for?

There is so much to grasp, at any one point. ‘We’ll clear a trail through the forest’, Hélène Cixous says, but ‘We can’t go via the city, nor at will, nor by bus’ (Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing). All those doors in the underpass, surely one was a portal? I thought it was only that you wanted me back in the leaf-trails of language. What is it that carries you now? The cold air whipped your chest and I pissed in the bushes. How much neon is the news.

Time collapsed so soft, we were in thrall of the science tiara.

We sat in this anonymous hotel lobby while the rain piled on and the beats got wet. Tresses of soaking beats. You say the only music that gets you now is pop. Continuum of sweetness in the formula lifts: the trick is melodic. So hot, you’re a burning peach. Embarrassed, I look at such childhood photos, the soft plash of it: language out of language it folds me again. Brush your hair. Softer your face, I come back to that star that is it. Approach, he holds out a finger to say, hello hello, hello you green. Is there something like a sour glissando? The bass was flat, my wilted leaves; the Styrofoam kept your guitar too warm. There are so many strings, collecting the sea. Only one you know

I was at the edge of a rainbow, sipping echinacea tea. ‘Farewell, Angelina, the sky is on fire and I must go…’ (Joan Baez, ‘Farewell, Angelina’). Do you think maybe it’s like, those emails were part of the plenum of summer, when I passed so south on the train with sugar-licked cakes of rice and a readerly silence? The sky was burnt and strange. And you could have boarded at the requisite moment, or maybe you were in the glass also, the glassery crying for the sound of drowning Amy from the game. When she did this impression of the lamb, I could not help but cry out. The aw, the aww, the missing ‘e’ in awe, a ewe. It was you. http://www.findyourfood/. Zombie tunes, sonic aporia. Mum said she nearly called me Amy, and I would have pink hair and sheaves of lyrical gestures, like this. Someone I loved had a house.

The sky is untitled.

Branding me narcopastoral, shepherdess at stringent dawn. We drag a high—

Break into it, careful at first then with clear intention. The wrapper falls back and away by clouds.

Upside down, we approach the softest waves. I’ll not harp on about the light, how it caught the crease of our plastic. You take us to the boat, so lovely and blue like sky. In the dream she unfurls her fist, a lot of blue dust comes out and her voice is thick and quick as an auctioneer’s. She has swallowed the age of the water. But we are rowing on, cordoned from time by the ripples of unforgivable sea. I want you to never forget this. Dream again—

We wandered a garden of samphire and crystal, met some friends at the edge of the blue. The grasses were singing a grassy melisma. Suffering cramps by the burning sea, the glass of the elsewhere orange, trembling sky. Scrolling my phone, I was reading an essay on birth control where the author, a man, argued that taken daily two spoons of honey would regulate your cycle. She got him by accident, a cherub handed down by the gold-dripping moon. I polished his soapstone limbs and drank from the chalice a lateral condition. Let’s go at this sideways, say every droplet of rain was a baby. Honey.

The additive birth of water, over.

Most palatial things are isles or sets.

They bring treacle scones for the picketers.

Bottles of wine for your glistening birthday. The sky is a film; it goes click, click. The season you say is looming, a moment agogic and I let you tender the rain of me down. I was all strings when the image appeared and you pulled on a tensile thread, a tease and we fell into the same whole notes…

‘Ion square, perspex swings / I breathe out, you breathe in / Permanent midnight’ (Bloc Party, ‘Ion Square’). It’s this song that feels like fucking, live in happiness, breakable day you free in a hold, before this sleep and the night bus home. I walk along the motorway. A breath between us feels like math, the ruination of the norm. I had nothing to bring you; I was reaching the end of the film where they find her dead, but only in photos. End of the lilting road. Quadratic Lily, Lily, say this is Lily. It’s just somewhere in London, and I want to love my mind. And I want to love my mind again. Did I love yours and yours too much. The fog rolls out of the square the same. When you drew me, it was like I didn’t have a face. The birches gifted their silver and I felt like sleep, so heavily berried. The sky is a film, you take it.

Trapped in acid, the hotel air is seething. I wanted breakfast to feel the same, and I wanted to love my mind; to love my mind for the sake of you in it. When the lyrics appeared it felt like the end-of-the-world digested, yes, it was a crème de menthe apocalypse — by which we mean, you can just hop in the grass of the future. Björk’s utopia. Juuuuuussssst that kiiiiiisssssssss. Perpex swings in helix of flute, could you insinuate a sleep, these spirals of harp. I’m not where I want exactly; look out the window. Sugar-rim. They pay less, pay less, pay less. A shot.

By the time I got back, the leaves were all gone. The stars, as if they were plural.

In the belly of the gnarliest graphics / I felt impaled on a former capital. There is luxury in the curriculum, but we live off our clearest cakes of rice. Break this as crumbs, don’t say word / The consoles cast their dust again. Press replay. I wanted to lie in a field, but that was you. A salty fist. I wanted the lie. Little curled hairs in the sink. Your name is doing well / Look where it got you.

The university a corpus ate the rat.

I was tired, you were tired, my mum was tired. This makes a rainstorm a screensaver.

Has anyone notified the trapeze artists about our sea?

Most things don’t occur as they do in this space. It flexes and folds in lucite, yet against the glint, less of your mobius eye. Roll it up, like a wave. We wait for the bus and it rolls in smoke / I press my faceless against the glass.

Bloc Party — Ion Square

Björk, Arca — The Gate

FKA twigs — home with you

Double Discone — Sam’s Kinky Hat

Clearance — Chances Are

Bradford Cox — Natural Harp Monitor

Princess Nokia — Balenciaga

DJ Heroin — My Veil

Grace Cummings — Paisley

Alice Coltrane — Lovely Sky Boat

Malibu — Nana (Like A Star Made For Me)

Hiro Kone — A Desire, Nameless

Hannah Peel ft. Hayden Thorpe — Cars In The Garden

The Brian Jonestown Massacre — Food for Clouds

Maija Sofia — The Glitter

Tomberlin — Seventeen

Weyes Blood — Seven Words

Soko — Sweet Sound of Ignorance

RF Shannon — Snake Oil

Caroline Polachek — So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings

The Everly Brothers — Love Hurts

The Cure — Charlotte Sometimes

Princess Chelsea — Come As You Are

Astrud Gilberto — Look To The Rainbow

NEW BOOK AND LAUNCH: Rainbow Arcadia

Excited to launch a new pamphlet, Rainbow Arcadia, published by Face Press. The launch will be a double affair, alongside Katy Lewis Hood, whose gorgeous sell-out SWATCH was recently published by glyph press.

If you’re around, please join us on the eve of the winter solstice, 21st December, at Typewronger Books for some poems and ~ festivities ~

feat. readings from:

Gloria Dawson
Kirsty Dunlop
Katy Lewis Hood
Maria Sledmere

Rainbow Arcadia (Face Press)

A suite of eight ambient poems printed in full-colour risograph, Rainbow Arcadia dramatises the sensuous carousel of the late-capitalist plaza and its whorled ontologies of hunger, shimmer and infinity. Exploring a lurid, kitsch and gelatinous anthropocene aesthetic, these poems embody the surrealist poetics of our material excess: lines whittled to sweetness and dissonance; an archival trace, a precarity.

SWATCH (glyph press)

Written over a year of locational, seasonal, and apparently epochal changes, SWATCH is a series of poems caught up in the tangles between language and matter in and against the captures of extractive capital and ruptures of environmental breakdown. Thinking with the (natural) histories of colour charts and all kinds of animals/vegetables/minerals/plastiglomerates, these poems play with, borrow and re-locate language in an attempt to inhabit entangled relations.

Katy Lewis Hood is a poet, editor, and PhD student currently based in London. She co-edits the poetry magazines amberflora and CUMULUS, and her poetry pamphlet SWATCH is forthcoming with glyph press in autumn 2019.

Maria Sledmere is working towards a DFA in anthropocene aesthetics at the University of Glasgow. She is a member of A+E Collective, freelance music journalist, Poetry and Nonfiction Editor for SPAM Press, Poetry Editor at Dostoyevsky Wannabe and founding editor of Gilded Dirt. Her new Sad Press pamphlet, nature sounds without nature sounds, follows the recnte publications: Existential Stationary (SPAM Press, 2018), lana del rey playing at a stripclub (Mermaid Motel, 2019) and a slender pamphlet of sonic essaying with Max Parnell, titled Pure Sound (SPAM Press, 2019).

Gloria Dawson lives in Glasgow and is trying to be the communist poet you want to see in the world. Most recent publication is circlusion (Zarf Editions, 2018) and you can also find work online at Datableed, amberflora, and other places where writing dwells.

Kirsty Dunlop lives in Glasgow and writes: short stories? poems? e-lit? collaborative fiction?- she’s not very sure most of the time. She is interested in the exciting possibilities of cross-medium, cross-form writing, and is currently working towards a DFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. You can read some of her work in journals such as SPAM and From Glasgow to Saturn.

Brand of Immortality

I can say we had no idea what we were doing here, but that wouldn’t be fair on Bill, who is always trying, who understands things in a way I suppose I could never. Bill with the sticky note diagrams pinned to our bed, torn down in the morning. He says my lack of understanding grants me a brand of immortality.

“I could never think about the future, babe,” he assures me, “because I know too much already.” The yellow notes curl in his fist.

Everything we do we do in present-tense; he makes sure of it. I wish he would elaborate on what he means by ‘brand’.

Every day he refuses to stare at horizons or watch the white scream of webpages buffering. He is never without some tool in his hand, whether it be a toothbrush, hacksaw or knife; he does not build, he will only fix. Never without a drink either, whether it be a mug of instant or a cup sloshing over with supermarket wine. We only need to take the car out five miles to the nearest store. We make our own convenience.

My favourite times of day at the cottage are dawn, noon and dusk. I like edges and centres. The caramel hour bitten into crisp wafer, wakefulness. Times right after the light changes and the clouds sweep into general elemental drama. I shiver in the damp air and go outside to catch a breeze, wrapped in the scratchiest blanket. I watch Bill take the boat out and kick shingle back into the sea, wishing I was smoking. Something I gave up when we moved south, along with everything else. The Topshop habit, the fibre-optic broadband, the Netflix subscription. In tattered clothes I walk the shore, losing my sequins. A lot of what remains from that time is stuffed in boxes beneath our bed. There isn’t space to pull it out, but on special occasions I’ll riffle through for a pair of shoes or a dress. Once, I salvaged my patent blue heels and a pale gold backless number and paraded down the creaking stairs, as though I were a prom queen, morning after, my hair unbrushed for days. Bill saw me at the door in the light and laughed.

“You look nice babe,” he offered. He was fixing something on the hinge, or the lock, wielding his drill. He gave me a look that only a father gives, a kind of bemusement and tolerance towards his daughter’s minor rebellions. As if I’d bothered smudging lipstick on as well, as if this were some extravagant transgression. I felt shame.

I sat at the makeshift desk we’d set up by the window, flipped open the laptop and looked for work. I did things freelance, intermittently. When I got a good job, I’d sometimes beat Bill in the takings, but such jobs were few and far between. Plus, they’d leave me ragged for nights, up late with the slowest WiFi, endlessly emailing and making notes. Times like these I missed smoking most. Smoking would fill a delay. I could never get my sentences right, and facts seemed increasingly blurry, always positioned ahead of me. It was like the sea licked the edge of my prose and wouldn’t let things settle. I hated every draft I ever completed. I needed that nicotine clarity, the stark voice of an editor at my back, the buzz and warmth of an office.

But then again I have space now. I let myself think.

We moved south to get away from something, sure. I’m not sure what we were looking for, was it solace in the water? Bill says it’s contaminated, the shoreline. He’s seen folk in high-vis doing tests, collecting samples. I’ve seen them too but never tell him. There used to be some kind of plant nearby, perhaps a rig; you can see its skeletal remains jutting out to sea on clear days, if you walk far enough west. The ghosts of a former infrastructure. I took loads of photos when I first saw it, I wanted to write a blog for this environmental organisation. I wanted to get paid for ranting about the surprising petro-landscapes of the south. I loved the way the sea stars and lush, cola-coloured kelp just clung to the rusted bars. Politically, things went sour that month and it wasn’t a good time for complaining about oil; I ended up writing on the specific variety of pink thrift that springs up hardily around our cottage. It was some cutesy piece for a gardening website where everything was written for ‘Mums’ specifically. They wanted you to send them an ‘everyday headshot’. You had to mention ‘your kids’ and make offhand remarks about a ‘work-life balance’.

I took my coil out months ago. I wanted to leave things to chance. Something he doesn’t know.

Bill and I have been painting the living room, a stark shade of yellow. He was so sceptical, humming and hawing in the B&Q we’d driven two hours to get to. I had printed off all these articles about how yellow increased happiness, how it set off your serotonin receptors, how it had served in this or that film set, how it could soften your lighting, your heart. The first thing Bill did when we left B&Q with the heavy pots of paint was spit, groggily, onto the concrete. He’d had a particularly bad cold but wouldn’t admit it. A woman was passing into the store with her daughter in arm, and looked at both of us in disdain. Not that Bill noticed. He was distracted by the task at hand. His spit swirled with luminous green, on the surface of the car park. It had landed perfectly, ridiculously, on a blue bottle cap. It looked like the fucking Earth.

Sometimes I wish I could really look into what’s happening, what’s to come. I’d be a much better freelancer, I’d predict and inform and connect. The old woman in the cafe says there used to be whooper swans, smews and teal. She has this whole list of beautiful birds she reels from. I see her once a week, sipping her Earl Grey tea on Friday afternoons — the only day I allow myself the luxury of hiding out here instead of the damp cottage, reading. I read whatever’s on the shelf of the cafe, trashy romances and natural history; I never finish the book I pick up, never ask to take it away with me. Borrowing seems too committal. The old woman says the land is dying; sometimes she is more specific. She remarks on my tardiness, remembers the days when girls dressed smart. I find it remarkable she still refers to me as ‘girl’, hasn’t noticed the streaks of silver in my hair, increasing day by day. Of course she is immaculate, a figure lifted straight from a 1950s knitwear catalogue.

My blood still comes, out of the blue in the night like a miracle. I lay awake listening to gushing rain.

The living room is finished, smelling fresh. I have drafted my piece about losing the birds, quoting Ms Earl Grey for good measure. Bill says I’ll struggle to find anywhere to send it. Nobody wants to hear about extinction, he says. Especially from someone so obviously immortal. He winks and I try to comprehend. Everyone is willing me into the present, but I can see the longview now and it is not bright, it is not yellow. The yellow won’t hide the cracks from the damp; the alkaline, unpleasant smell leaking out from the soil beneath us. The men in high-vis taking samples wear yellow. When I stand on the edge of the shore with hail in my eyes, their yellow mixes up with the yellow of boats and lights of distant harbours. When I look out to sea I don’t know what I’m seeing. The tide gets closer to the cottage each day. Soon there’ll be water at the door.

Bill might find a solution, build a wall. I am not so sure he can solve this. He asks why my eyes are stung red and raw each night and I blame the weather. He runs his fingers along my spine and tastes the future inside me, bruises me like a fruit he can’t quite eat. In the morning I wake up and stare at the yellow, remembering.

Tag: colour