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).
It’s almost autumn and I can’t stop listening to The Corrs. Something ringing in the falling rain a leaf-lorn runaway, never gonna stop falling, wish I could play the strings and not cry over a snapped shoelace that Saturday, wish I could never need name this. A fresh nostalgia for Flash player, a bad new year, kneeling in the car dirt of roadsides to fix my bike, the air all gone out of each tyre it’s tiring to be here / wish I could change. Not into other people but into the person I was, rosy-fingered sleepless rolling cinnamon skins and talking on the internet while in the other town this guy throws a mattress out of a window. If memory serves to fall out with it. Black lace and white corduroy out to the woods I’m happiest on the hill where I see this deer, evidently a teenage stag and I’m calling angel androgynies the very next stray. Fucked up salads of affect, afraid to go outside. Emma says everyone’s a poet. You just go.
Crying in the cobblers for other omens.
Girls in the nineties with strands of dark hair, box-dyed. The electricity all gone out. I was supposed to be planning a workshop, writing a lecture. The universe owns me, doesn’t owe me.
Across oceans of static, watching you typing…
I cycled past the cathedral and saw the sycamores blush orange as if in real-time metabolising their chlorophyll before me. I google the phrase ‘fall splendour’ in guilty luxuriance. A man on my street pisses against the wall, daylight screams; he pisses for so long I think he will disintegrate in dumb liquid gold. Can’t concentrate on this Zoom call. I’m missing something real of the days before me. Girl in old man bar is singing a ballad. Can you drink a black hole if you can’t drink a Guinness? Colin says Brian says you’d have to suck through a straw at the speed of light. Girl in old man bar is wearing tartan, a velvet headband, recently expired lipstick. I like her.
Singing Eliza Carthy, singing Amen Dunes…
I always want autumn too early and pine for spring. Trillions of magazines tell me it’s not cool having holes in my tights. It’s not cool having ragged cuticles.
Ten years of sleazy beauty.
A paintbrush yellowing in sordid water.
Forever down Cathcart Road.
Incurable bed mornings of limb ache and long illness, it’s fine like to say it’s totes, bring myself coffee in bed and emails filling me with autumn leaves and the fly infestation fed upon fruit and air…a red car rolling backwards up the street…
It used to be so easy to write these like it never mattered to write at all. The sky is still whey and there are new routes to get to the same old temples. I swirl my tongue in the google doc long enough to know how I’d touch you; the hopescape bristles with city pollution. My friends have been to Greece and Bali, the Hebrides. I have been to Edinburgh for work. Come down the wrong side of the hill among gorse and scramble, the rocks coming loose and my heart gone trash-eating in the nights of bad sleep again, all again, falling awake with the light on, spilled ink in my sheets. I met the same America on Netflix checking my brain, my gag reflex.
I heard the blood blister in that guitar riff and it was like vomiting behind the shopping mall in Kilmarnock, drunk on bus wine and the Alice in Chains of my arteries…you awake, say the word clavicle, touch my spine…
Thrilled to announce I’ll be working with Beyond Form Creative Writing again this autumn to offer two new workshops. The first, Epistolary Experiments, begins on 28th September and is a monthly, four-part series designed to explore the arts of letter writing and correspondence across different forms. We’ll be thinking about how the work of address, posting, description and all its intimacy and triangulation can tell a story, evoke fantasy scenarios or perform an expansive, relational lyric. The second, Pop Matters: Our Songs, is a one-off workshop on 23rd November and offers a warm and upbeat ‘studio’ for musing on the relationship between creative practice and pop music. How do we write through and towards pop with all our devotion or ambient dwelling in its neon glow? Both workshops will involve a mix of reading other work, discussion and structured individual writing activities. There will never be any pressure to share work, although you will have access to the workshop threads on Experimental Creatives Collective, a closed forum space where further discussion and sharing can take place if anyone wishes.
For both workshops, there is both a full price and two concession rates.
Epistolary Experiments
4 Sessions Starting Wednesday September 28th
6-8:00pm (GMT) via Zoom
‘I write you a letter to make eyes at a reader I don’t know from Adam’ (Kay Gabriel). From Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) to Sean Bonney’s incendiary Letters Against the Firmament (2015), letter-writing or ‘the epistolary’ has inflected all kinds of writing, including novels, poetry and manifestos. Taking cue from Kay Gabriel’s ‘The Purloined Lyric’, we’ll explore the possibilities of letters, address and communication in all kinds of writing, practice and performance. While the literary letter has an established tradition, we’ll look at contemporary artists/authors who shake up the form of correspondence and in turn reframe desire, play, identity, sex, intimacy, domesticity and the political.
In this four-part, monthly series, we’ll look at several key areas: the love letter, the political letter, the fantasy letter and the postcard. A letter can triangulate writer, addressee and reader in endlessly generative ways, not to mention the origami of folds between art, life and writing, and this series is designed for creatives of all kinds to think about the epistolary genre in their own practice. Whether you want to incorporate the letter form directly into your work as source material/form, or simply use it as an extra tool in your research, reflection and development process, this series offers a generative starting point. Workshops will combine reading and reflection with individual writing activities, with some opportunities for collaboration including optional pairing of participants as ‘pen-pals’ for the duration of the course.
Open to all skill levels and writers and creatives of all mediums. You can sign up for all or just some of the weeks!
♡
Session 1 September 28th: The Love Letter
An iconic motif in the history of film and literature, the love letter conveys acts of noticing, clandestine reflections, confessions, embarrassment and desire. The love letter might be a plot device, a poetic ode, a pop song, a frank or coded material expression. The love letter tells a story, obscures a truth, embodies connection; it might concern romantic, platonic or comradely love. Sometimes a love letter goes beyond the intended beloved and forges all sorts of new energies and worlds. We’ll write into all these intimacies and frictions.
Key writers include John Keats, Jane Campion, Kay Gabriel, Jo Barchi, Diana Hamilton, Frank Ocean
Session 2 October 26th: The Political Letter
By reading unsent letters, letters to everyone, letters to no one, we’ll consider how the art of writing letters is a radically social form. Playing with the art of address and description, this workshop explores how the letter form can explode and disseminate ideas of presence, identity, desire and political (im)possibility.
Key writers include Bernadette Mayer, Fred Moten and Sean Bonney
Session 3 November 30th: The Fantasy Letter
Sometimes we write to someone who might never read our letters. We write to fictional characters, other writers or artists — some of them lost to time. These epistles might take the form of fan letters, speculative letters, epistolary letters or fantasy missives — defying the limits of time, space, the living and dead. In this workshop we’ll engage with such letters to consider voice, the intimate arts of reading, communication between forms, the body and queer temporalities.
Key writers include Dodie Bellamy, Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, Jack Spicer
Session 4 December 14th: The Postcard
‘A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending’ (Derrida, The Post Card). What does it mean to send, or be sent? This final workshop takes the pithy form of the postcard as a figure for the literary possibilities of posting. What temporality does a postcard hold? What happens in the relationship between word and image, expression and constraint, public and private? Could we write postcards to the past or future, to the more-than-human? Can thinking postcard help us rethink other kinds of ‘posting’ and (un)delivery in our daily and writerly lives?
Key writers include: Postcards from the Anthropocene project, Jacques Derrida, Kiraṇ Kumār
Building on the success of the 2020 Pop Matters series, this workshop offers a warm and upbeat ‘studio’ for musing on the relationship between creative practice and pop music. We’ll focus mostly on pop music and love/devotion, making space for writing which borrows from the form of pop music or writes to specific pop artists. We’ll consider how pop can offer the emotional and structural inspiration for other kinds of creative output, the role of pop in everyday life/life-writing and the mythologies we give to pop icons in writing. Designed for anyone who wants to flirt with a bit of pop in their practice, this workshop will feature music, free association, reading and stimulating activities for writing.
Key writers include: Kevin Killian, Dana Ward, Anne Boyer, Ian Macartney
Pleased to announce I’ll be working with Aaron Kent in editing an anthology of poetry and prose in response to Frightened Rabbit. I’m anticipating this as a really special project, and a chance to make something collaborative in celebration of the work of a band that touched the lives of so many. I love music! The pandemic knocked some of that out of me for a while, but it sounds good again. Music! I want to write about it all the time. Send us your best odes, ekphrasis, reflections, fiction, mini essays, lyrics etc.
~
I went looking for a song for you — Frightened Rabbit, ‘The Oil Slick’
Edited by Maria Sledmere & Aaron Kent
From the release of their debut album, Sing the Greys (2006), Frightened Rabbit were a phenomenal presence in the lives of many. To be at a Frabbit show, to read the liner notes, to belt the words back at your friends was to feel if not release then solidarity in suffering. To catch love from the greys and live in colour. The band’s inimitable singer Scott Hutchison (also a talented illustrator) penned lyrics that captured the weight and heat of adolescence and its wreck, of joyous chaos and loneliness, of growing into a person, falling in and out of love. Frabbit helped many of us nurture a voice in the woodpile of the dark, and to embrace what happens when it sparks.
This anthology is a celebration of Frightened Rabbit’s work in both music and community. Their songs inspired many of us to pick up a pen and write, or share our stories and inner lives with others. We are looking for work that engages with the themes of the Frabbit discography: work that takes its cue from a quoted line, a song, a title, a particular performance. Work that processes the memories filtered through music, that delves into the landscapes, emotional topographies and rich imaginaries of the Frabbit world. Work that shows us how the band’s immense legacy continues through our words, and makes tiny changes.
As Tom Johnson, founder of the magazine GoldFlakePaint writes in a heartfelt tribute to Scott, not long after his passing: ‘The songs are right there anyway; they will always be there’. This is an invitation to carry on the songs. Send us your poems, send us your words.
It’s a rare sunny day in Glasgow today (for now) as yesterday was perpetual blue all day and the kind of light to make flames in your hair in pictures. I wanted to share this song because every time it’s blue-skied in Glasgow I think of that moment of change in the mood of the lyrics, and how in the record version you have the huge sense of something rising with that brass and the sense of singing fully in the chorus of yourself,
Well the city was born bright blue today And I whistled through the sunlit streets And my empty hand Felt cold and unused
And I’m quite all right, I get by just fine I’m not depressed, not most of the time It’s just the fun stuff Is much less fun without you
I first discovered this song on a friend’s playlist, although I had heard it long before of course, but seeing it among other songs someone I cared about had chosen was special: like someone opening a door to the blue of the song you go out in, with the sunlit streets ahead of you.
The Luna Erratum, Maria Sledmere’s debut poetry collection, roams between celestial and terrestrial realms where we find ourselves both the hunter and hunted, the wounded and wounding. Through elemental dream logics of colour, luminosity and lagging broadband, this is a post-internet poetics which swerves towards the ‘Other Side’: a vivid elsewhere of multispecies relation, of error and love, loss and nourishment. Its leitmotif of Luna, a shapeshifting feline of satellite proportion, waxes and wanes through poems which move beyond the twilight moods of left melancholia, sad hospitality and ecological crisis towards a fugitive imaginary that lingers in the ‘Flirtation Device’ of lyric and its many echolocations.
Taking cue from Jenny Boully’s ‘erratum’ — ‘the text of what is and the text of what should have been’ — Sledmere writes with failure, friction and fractal attention, with a yearning for intimacy, shelter and ongoing ways of bearing the im/possible. She offers poems of mystery, refusal and pain at personal, political and planetary scales, tracing the desire-lines of the everyday and its glitching encounters. The Luna Erratum is a book of memory and friendship in the so-called anthropocene, of bodily disorder, painterly gesture, quantum kissing, rodent sisterhood, open world intervention, technology, tenderness, shimmer and song.
☆
Praise for The Luna Erratum:
How do you explain yourself to yourself when you suspect that actuality – your experience of it – is provisional and full of error? You come up with your own poetics, your own tense and mode of address, which is a lunar one, and which involves speaking in crushed, frothy mouthfuls to a terrifyingly silent, unpredictable and generous friend (celestial objects, an indifferent lover, &c.).
The Luna Erratum offers no truth except in things – colours, materials, beings, dreams, schemes of language, human artefacts and locations – and their known convergences, all of which hold as much affective weight and capacity for transformation as the events that precipitated this profoundly graceful, unsettling and mesmerising book.
— Sophie Collins, author of Who is Mary Sue? (Faber, 2018)
☆
A glittering universe, Maria Sledmere’s first poetry collection is both lyrical and electric, both video game and watercolour. Reading these poems feels like ingesting semantic MDMA, the ectoplasm of a Victorian ghost trying to reach her lover through an unstable wifi connection. Sledmere’s words ooze a desire that is part animal, part human, part astral body. Let them transfix you.
— Nadia de Vries, author of I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021)
☆
In Maria Sledmere’s The Luna Erratum, rivulets of neon daylight stream through the ever-quickening fibre-optic cables of the soul. Beneath ‘morphine clouds’ climates change as human groans crosspollinate in the moon’s tread. Sledmere concentrates the neural pathways on the world spirit, crossmatching the matters of attention. The lines grasp at what repositories of sentiment might be made secure for poetic memory, as the pleasure of every experience is threatened by its immediate disappearance, like Bernadette Mayer reciting Keats in the abandoned sea life centre. And yet, for the poet’s eye, the sumptuous bounties of the world are still all up for grabs; the human squats on top of the non-human and: ‘you can take bites from the sun’. This book is a hot tub full of Tamagotchi frogs’ spawn glistening in the light of the full moon atop the Yggdrasil skyscraper.
— Ed Luker, author of Other Life (Broken Sleep, 2020)
☆
If you would like a copy for review, or to stock in your bookshop, please email mariasledmere [at] outlook [dot] com. 🙂
Wet-leaved, walking up hills with chain oil on my elbows, knuckles, knees. We are on the eve of the ‘big climate conference’, which is to say, to be a host city of preemptive closure: there will be no more roads so that nobody can block the roads without authority, no more bridges for your tiny feet. I imagine a commute that takes me north to Kirkintilloch and back along the canal, an extra hour and a half of leg power and stamina and to arrive like of a beetroot complexion to the moment when somebody speaks. These streets are mostly broken glassed, and I see nothing to sweep that; I see buildings go up, see extravagant plant life grow from abandoned houses. I dream about bike punctures from enormous shards of glass. A mushroom sprouts in the brutalist building. I should have planned to do something. More tired than words can.
Imagine awaking beautifully at 5am each day, to actual birdsong and car sounds, still going through the night to Edinburgh or the general east as they do. I miss the ocean, which I have not seen since May. Sometimes I forget that its quiet, rhythmic hush is always in my ears, a tinnitus with the switcher dimmed. All summer I swapped the ocean for industrial estates, teeming with buddleia. If I go to a club, it gets full bright. The hush. At 6am I make atomic coffee, await words, say rain. I could tell you about the new university building and how I will never find a space to work there, doomed to circle identikit floors like airports in a suspended time that nonetheless eats into my time of work, a starship, doomed to fill a cup of hot water and carry it up and down escalators only to be cast back outside with scalded hands, cried into blustering autumn. A hazmat suit to be a student, studying the microparticles of your love in blunder. If I could study on the floor, in the street, with the leaves stuck to me. But I am a sufferer of frostbite and poor circulation, owing to damp homes, an unfortunate experience in the snow and damaged nerves, fragile metabolism. I am not there anymore, in the place we have been
Canned words taste better with more salt on them. Fuck you. Sitting on the curb in the 1990s surprised us when a plane went by, it was carrying my childhood. Remember we used to put each other literally in bins, until that wasp stung your ass and I was sorry. We prise open tins for the juicy bits of the story like, what would it take to get the attention of a virulent benefactor? Should you become a red squirrel enthusiast, or take up the statuesque hobbies of sportsmen? What beneficent largesse would require it?
Imagine not living by the anticipatory hormone storm of a coming menstruation, or like, the cramping wildness of the night and morning or blood gushed trying to have coherent thought in the day when your mind is fog. I want to transcribe some of that fog to writing, to remember how it was when again I am in clearing, to be like this is the place, it’s never gone. I was held in it, the tearing itself to shreds sensation to write this at six in the morning before work. Plants don’t have to go through this; is it that they’re always ‘working’? How do trees feel when they shed their leaves? Is it like an annual period and do they miss them? Should I develop fondness for shreds of blood in the toilet, abject bits of me and not? I saw a leaf blush out of my mouth and into a leaflet. Smoking kills. I watch the men in high-vis sweep up the dead leaves, more like dying, into black bags by the side of the road. Someone around here is always burning rubber tyres in secret. It’s kind of erotic to watch people do something repetitive and with great concentration, as if no one else could possibly notice this. To do your work that way. O your beautiful butterfly shoulders. Missed opportunities.
For instance, I could have lived through this moment to learn another language, write a curriculum vitae for the purposes of waged employment, called you.
“It feels so good to walk in nature.”
Blood drop in the shape of sycamore.
Where is Canada?
The revenge fantasy is only that trees are flirtatious as hell, winking pollen so that you watery-eyed have to look up at the stars sometimes and beg, like take me. Let me out of the forest so I might see
(fantasies of committee,
the ground to tie
my own laces in figures of eights.)
Authenticity!
The figure of eight in Karla Black’s sculpture which is pink-smeared recalling everything I used to put on my face. The idea is to find a sort of peace with it. School bathrooms where a face was pressed against glass and cruelly examined. I dream of rooms filled entirely with blizzards of eighties-blue eyeshadow. Angel Olsen, 2014, Pitchfork Festival. Having lived with the spirit not for resale, traded on a stark memory of that colour where every remembrance seems to intensify blue, until all I have is the pigment itself, ultramarined into oblivion. To wake into that blue and not see beyond it. I put my sore arm through the right-hand loop of the eight and pulled this out for you.
In the dream we pass an armed convoy and into the bakery with coins allotted to us by authority figures, and we buy pastries adorned by sugar ice drawn in mobius curlicues, and the pastries flake away as we eat them, greedily on the street, so many flakes falling before the guards. And we are butter-mouthed in the face of conflict, war and summit. A kind of shout chokes the air but the golden morning goes on, the falling leaves. I have these cramps and double over in the falling leaves. Men come to sweep around me, where I have fallen. One of them bends down — he is so young to be working — and pats my head tenderly and I see a leaf fall behind him and I know that leaf to be us, so we embrace platonically for one moment, as though I were his long-lost twin, before the foreman calls his name, which I can’t recall—
No, not that at all — he touches the soft part of my ear, goes “are you not young to be leaving?”
In trash, the language of trash, the trash piled up against the highway of your declaration. The men stopped coming.
Azalea, camilla, plum blossom, hydrangea.
Rizla, tin foil, styrofoam, gum.
The noise of vehicles pulling up around the city, emitting fumes.
The petals shed and I sleep on them, dreaming my blue becomes turquoise
mariaology 