It was supposed to snow in the night and the not snowing was sore as a missed period. I awoke with two crescent-shaped moons in the palm of my hand and thought of a sacrifice unwittingly given in dreamland. Said Jesus. Peridot phlegm and the scratchy sensation, knowing that speech too could be cool, historical, safe. Could not see beyond pellucid rivulets, Omicron my windows, my streaming January. January
streams from every well-known orifice of the world. Its colour is shamelessly stone. I seem to be allergic to inexplicable moments and so keep to the edge of the polyphony of yellow. I am cared for. The Great Barrier Reef dissolves in my dreams the substrate of yellow. It goes far. Pieces of the GBR are washed ashore in Ayr, Singapore, Los Angeles, Greenland. I go to these places by holding a polished boiled candy in my mouth, like the women in Céline and Julie Go Boating. My ankles licked by truest shores / but January didn’t fucking happen.
❤
Put together the orange-purple rose, your possible outcomes are red or gold (if you are lucky). Two reds together, with the golden watering can, could result in the rare blue rose. A novel rose. Black velvet roses grow in the old woman’s garden because she has infinite time to tend them. I’m not saying she’s immortal, like the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish; only that she doesn’t exist in our time. It’s rude to assume so. I’m not saying the lines of her face are asemic writing — nobody did that to her, or scarred her. She’s not scared. She just lives and dies all the time. She waters the roses.
Sometimes I imagine her in fisherman’s clothes, in meshy nightclub outfits of neon flavours, in extravagant ballgowns, blue boilersuits. Sometimes I’ve seen her before. The only way I can see her is to climb a few steps on the ladder by the village store, its red paint flaking, and I hang my body upside down the other side, risking exposure. I never eat before doing this. She doesn’t see me; she doesn’t see her roses either, not the blooms. In the village, people walk around with handfuls of rose seeds sometimes strung in little hemp bags. These are the currency of care. I have tended the young with haircuts and watched the flourishing of teenage roses. They say I am an old lady in the garb or garbage of former actresses. I hear them sing to me their stories. “Remember she shot the guy who brought the astrograss”. What they don’t remember, whippersnappers, is the incorrigible realism of that turf. Fuck it, I have done nothing wrong. I perform for them my cowboy gardening. Broadcast the surplus value of our mutual twilight. Halloween roses for everyone. Every night I wake up from someone else’s childbirth and the world is so sore, the wound in the sky the snow wants to fall through. They bandaged it with realism. I need to go far. Do you remember the last time you awoke and felt like a person?
❤
The roses grow up in the gaps of the cattlegrid, knowing they will be trodden on. Again and again. We can’t stop them from doing this and they do it so often we have to account for a portion of Waste. Kissing you is itself a trellis. But we are propped and grown sideways with the vines strung betwixt our ribs. We are babies.
I like the tired way the roses intonate colour. The economics of the roses. Their euphemistic fetish. I tried to avow my commitment to rosehood the day I saw your calves all torn, and saw about women getting their labias reduced, and the red, blood roses sold on the internet, and rest. I lay this on your grave, the world.
My love, as a redness in our rosette That’s newly worn in June O my love, like the melt That’s sweetly played in turbines
So fairway artery thou, my bonnie lasso Defiled in love as I Will love thee still, my decade Tinged as the seas are garlanded dry
Tinged all the seas as thee, my decanter At the romantic menagerie of sunset I will luminary still, a debutante Of the lighthouse sarcophagi
And plough thee well, my only lathe! And plough thee well, awhile! And I will come again, my love Though it were ten thousand millennium.
My love’s rose-coloured highlighter really hurt the extra-textual, and thus booked trains to bed. I had an identity. I knew what you had done to the text. Austerity of the meadow to blame for ongoing culling of kin. You are abandonable as you have always been. Saplings for pronouns.
I feel wild and sad.
I feel pieces together stirring inside the world. Little bits of coral awake in my throat, the shape of eight billion sun-spike proteins I was dumb enough to swallow. It is not my fault but in my dreams I get product emails like, Forget-me-not a pair of jeans, high-waisted Levi’s as if to wear at the end of the month we keep saying sorry for delay, embroidered our thighs with spiders excuses to use lighters without smoking does it make us vectors the warning of snow and ice still issued from inside the snow globe of the rosehip changes as it withers, glass shards pissed from acid clouds in all colours: black, blue, burgundy, cherry brandy, coral cream, dark pink, green, lavender, light pink, lilac, orange, peach, purple’s timeless red, salmon, Hollywood white & yellow, rainbow chosen for the significant other, a masculine flower dipped in fortified light, I’m thankful I look good lying down, the long unconditional stem aka Lemonade, l-l-l-lemonade, l-l-l-lemonade…….
There is a place where these supermassive roses might be planted. A harsh place that exists at thin resolution, we have to resample; I am doing the maths to know how 100gb permits her entrance. The process slows because this behaviour is not natural. Her entrance with the roses bundled in giant’s arms, and the long tresses of foam and seven neat words she has tucked in a satchel of crocheted pea proteins. She is attuned to a certain instant where it works that she plants the roses. They are gnarly, monstrous, thirsty. The roses are not sober. And the girl? She stumbles on her third negroni, abstracted, poured by the silent one who inhabits the hedgerows. Vermouth of sun, gin of moon, aperitif of the bitterwort and marshes, garnished with wedges of orange from overseas. These seven neat words I will not tell you with her lips sealed blood sugar, femme confection, a certain rain, a squall.
The clarity is lost a little when we adjust figures. But the girl is still there, in the corner maybe, bundled from sight with impossible flowers. What do we know of a girl and her flowers? She could be a waitress, a bridesmaid, a funeral attendant — but no, this is extravagance to belie all such professions. The flowers won’t fit in the picture this is. It is not merely to carry. Some say they are hyperobjects, but if so, what of the girl? She is also beyond human proportion; she would live a thousand years. Sprinkle hundreds and thousands of leap years merely upon breakfast, and yet at nineteen does she not look a million? If you were to splay the fine skin between her thumb and forefinger, you would begin to see the star stuff which flows in human capillaries. But at such resolution!
Of her face since nineteen, the narrator of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover [L’Amant] (1984) writes: ‘But my face hasn’t collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste’. So when the girl lay down for another of her size; they were a cloud, it rained, the girl awoke with child. But she gave birth to nothing but roses. She was a fixture of the processing plant. Initially, sealed in mousseline baubles, they were not even roses but rosehips clustered among thorned vines. And you would imagine these vines entwined with her spine, climbing them as if the destiny was always her neck. She would speak at night, tapping the fine glass, warming them as eggs. Give everything away: the rose-meat of petals and their pale, inward jam, hatching saps, their crying.
A cloud always passes, it creases the sky. Cars go in and out at night.
~
The fruit of rose, especially a wild kind when I write of a Mary Sue or brush her teeth, when she is more tall than willow and yet I have set her colours inverse so in reaching for rosehips she must reach into shadow and isn’t that all in the working day of dreams is deferral of Edenic cinema, she grows in wilderness also known as the fortress of lossy compression where trees are shaky with original pixels and her clothes are torn as mine would be crying forever by the sea with my dairy allergy for twilight ‘The blues are because you’re getting fat and maybe it’s been raining too long’ and if she is me then I am she rehearsing definitions for litany via prayer, supplication, complaint am I a melt vector on cutting board you call me aslant with the knife tucked close to cupid’s bow of my lips ‘she was noted for her command of dialogue’ but no one said anything lipsticks: sweet chestnut, amarena red tender rose and orange delight shaking the rosehips all night for Roman god of erotic love is just rare labour of the shepherds in pleasantview, saying sorry or what colour your blouse is, mine is damask you could press to make attar so I know how I love is mother puts glitter on a wreath of ivy and dying hydrangeas to hang on the door, entrance Mx I give you generally acceptable apples the shop called jazz, they are wrapped in plastic we look up to see the planets ‘almost touching’ but they are something else entirely easy, lucky or free. These green diamonds don’t occur in the wild; she makes them from slices of apple glitch effect plumbob oil of rose is condensation a playable simulation novelist in decline as I lick the sea wall cast this upwards to where another hour is ravished you start to read.
PART TWO: SACRED PORRIDGE
Perhaps this would be enough of the rose-girl if she would stop haunting me. I dreamed Bernadette Mayer wrote a novel overnight, it was midsummer, she was 27 and had a fountain pen the size of the Eiffel Tower. Tell me what she was smoking, was it Marlboro or lemongrass? Maybe cloves? I get mixed up, I’m darks and pastels, nobody likes me. Open a beer to share regardless / Crude oil streams from her words. I became suspicious the rose-girl was a fiction of Bernadette’s, that I was stuck in the internet fiction and whittled away. There was a poem called ‘Thorn’ about a penis. Brexit or no Brexit, I was anyway hoarding tins of beans in the hope they would get me somewhere – a similar purpose to breakfast. Recite to me from memory these stats about lactose, creatine, muscle enhancement. I lift my arms to reach you, I am hauled to the new wall painted mint to match the green iris tea of your eyes, it’s Greenwich Park / I am spent with apple pips and cauliflower hallways. I want to be hurled across continents sprightly / put acorn in pocket. I am not her but she is me, here, in a harsh place. You are the smoothest nut! What was the novel? I don’t know, I have this line: ‘the negative capability of raisins’. Don’t kill the squirrels! Sunday you make porridge with peanuts, sour cream, biscuit, honey, drops of chocolate, muscovado sugar, extra milk of oat – why not acorns? The rose-girl watches. Her breath is a draught.
She is so huge you would miss her. All December the faint scent of her pea satchel follows me so I know I couldn’t possibly have corona. Plunge my nose in vegetal folds. I would be the aura of plasma around her sun, that’s all and merely. Does it rot? The size of these roses, really, is impossible to measure. Expect several hundred metres or miles, stumbling in the world of error where we go to buy bread. Is it for months you have been a tile, a talking head? You are very delicate and I stroke your nice hair, which loosens through the screen to meet me waterfall. I climb to the top of the beanstalk we braided from eating well. We read Lee Harwood in the rain, As Your Eyes are Blue, and drink mulled wine. I guess I am riding horses to catch up with the size of these roses, blue ones also, fat and mellow. Jackie Wang calls this ‘outlaw jouissance’; a phrase I wrote in my notebook, quickly. The line gets whipped! I think about Cy Twombly. The horses are all kinds of colours, but mostly the pearlescence of inside seashells, or mollusc aurora’d in a way that seems Björk or genital. I suppose the rose-girl arranges them nightly as saints do, genial; I suppose it is like Sylvanian families. Sometimes from copses of rowans, the tops of the miniature or minotaur trees, red-berried painted I read her SylviaPlath. My poison voice must catch the wind exact, ‘The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea / And comes from a country far away as health’, as health shall be a human dimension, unrhymed, the rose-girl considers. She is the only one of us who has seen a corpse flower, in a third-floor apartment where somebody important had smuggled the seeds from Chicago, where was she. The corpse flower is not a singular flower but a cluster of blooms, and so is she. It all stinks, I say, so I don’t have corona. If you touch the flanks of these horses so smooth your hands will vanish in gossamer, they become other materials, still smell like hay. This viscosity to friction feels good, it’s lush with endorphins — why don’t you try it. The water is warmly you and me, like the sea; it comes from the eyes of the rose-girl, crying.
~
There’s still time to shop, you collect from store towards a possible come on let’s go of the literal it stings, who you would be in the dream not the enemy’s eye or the unripe banana I stayed in bed til mid-afternoon writing feel-thesis, correcting citations of Clarice Lispector it’s Christmas, you know I don’t have corona on the phone to Avanti the songs are played in such intervals of 45 seconds as to make you hate the very nature of a chord progression is desire’s deferral and will you secure a seat for us at motion sickness what is necessity feels like Velocity is I am washing my hair with tar shampoo and cider vinegar. Come close, wish soon, revese December. Should I call someone? It might be you, explaining multiplication to me, you carry the one and the two, and then I never do read my old diaries smelling of blood and sleep deprivation acrid bulimia, spray of A7 garlic mussels, scarlet muscles my brother says he will donate his plasma for medical causes, have I fear of needles? Lady bird shell collect bathroom dust, antibodies, I am clean and typeset like the stars. You open my coat because of this Reynauds, too cold to unbutton. My anhedonia is cyclical, I stick little poems to the wall they go like
once upon a midnight weary came the lovers on a ferry they were drunk and very old but never had they had a cold over the hills and overseas they could be you or even me
It’s like the Friday of 2019 I read Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant journals from low-res pdf festive darkness crying in trashland and couldn’t stop tasting purple for a week of otherwise phantosmia, what I smelled was the crushed illustrious rose of infinity pinned to my bittersweet nasal cavity as I am to watch corpse flower time-lapse resemble green diamond, they erect an umbrella and a rare titan arum bloom beneath you typing at the library am I bike spoke, a concept strike for closing the erstwhile windows? Click to know mood… We keep going We leap in a pool of pure negroni and my lungs keep coming up blossom of orange and call you “Hey everyone welcome back to the room, you can open your eyes now” Like probably I have told you before about the band I am starting, a synth-punk deathcore revivalist outfit called Yoga with Adriene I have her permission, she says May all beings be happy Move from a place of connect Present and awake Love your neighbour Things get better, they have to It’s a revolution of the muscular laxation of the life you find cored If you have apple belly thick-skinned of futurity, there will be a chorus and verse for this that goes like scream Motive, Trust, Floor, High, Kindle, Salve, Soften, Strength & Harmony My thighs are burning brightly, it’s the end friend of my Norwich or Brighton, Manchester, Glasgow and some kind of New York resemblance is ‘cracking America’ at the top of your list I have never been to the south coast of an average celestial body yet watering your houseplants I won’t go viral in the night with pills and tweets There’s no cheating in yoga, you make it your own as I do cartwheels on a leap day of acid comedown they say I do it too fast the flight gets in and distant cat miaows as I do kiss you a lot they say catharsis is found in the blues and green laps up the rest is stretching if you can only find it like the sweet spot asana with arm across chest I am become rowan tree, flexing queen of the prom you pluck fruit pastilles from inside me the sea, first try is easy.
PART THREE: TENDER ALPHABET
A. will write in the time of commute B. prefers spearmint toothpaste C. is inside of me D. the size of Paris cumulus E. is all you can eat, ecstasy F. who I love G. has grown H. the hendecasyllabic I fail to write I. doesn’t rightly exist J. sends endless emails K. is a joke L. for loosening jewellery M. with dark sweet cherries and doubles N. conspicuous passionate weekend O. checks the notification P. of classical pleasure Q. minds the gap R. is a rising rat-souled singer S. supposes the cognitive deficit T. exists in lyric saloon U. then driving me up the highway V. to frangible lust I am W. of shimmer lamb X. into cowbell rhythms we go Y. yellow warning of wind has been issued Z. is a property of citrus
PART FOUR: FLOWER SHOW
In The Besieged City (1948) by Clarice Lispector, ‘the flower was showing off […] it too was untouchable, the indirect world’, ‘exhausted’, ‘What is the flower made of if not of flower itself’.
OPEN LOOP ( BOUQUET ( ) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ) )
The flower exclaimed a soft orchestral impression of breathing. Adults no longer snack in movies. Spent five hours on a train, six on Zoom, three in the outside air is nice. A time-lapse corpse flower, the music being used, pace of light. Heat syncope of the sea, we dive. Someone is hired to recover her pearls or pears. My skin is peeling from sanity gels.
A fault language of shiningly happy teenagers. Rosettes for the nuclear pony. It’s all total showers today. Condensery of lemonade gemstone, sertraline, the lapwing massacre in a Sufjan track / so I am endlessly sorry.
PART FIVE: NATAL SMUDGE
When everything started to wilt, the moon was too late. Untouchable stem of a name, yet the rose-girl knew what to do. She swallowed the world like a gobstopper, a lightbulb, a tulip. The arrogance of sundown was only that it knew how to try.
Turning over, see the supermassive rose in her belly.
Superstitious gemstones include violets and opals, sleepflower, nightshade; don’t @ me if you think they are cruel or kind. Marlene drops cranberries from the wall and you piss twice as hard in Scarborough Fair, are you sad, buy me blue cheese, there is vigilance in the dead. Rosemary for memory, thyme for a life you led, who sells it. Marlene says she misses Alisha, that’s not-me. Pray you arrive here safely, smudge of tarragon, mushroom photography, lines of flight.
We, after Sophie, after Frank, say Ask for everything!
Regarding conjunction, something about publishing, spirituality, knowledge and authority figures. There will be tension with Aquarius principle. A slip of paper. I was born at 06:20, in a thunderstorm.
[Oh yes! x]
The rose-girl had an overture: she tore wedding pearls from her branch-sized clavicle, let them scatter from the tub where she lay and the tub was a cloud, the pearls were snow. At the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, she was a divorce child with her hair in two plaits we would climb up to kiss at the nape of her neck, that’s it, I play all my aces so we won’t die. These cards are beautiful, we turn them away. There will be no dying, not here or now. I thresh the rest of my skyluck, lager, my skylark. I’m lucky the mirror is showing up nowhere. Sometimes it is Freud’s voice, or an oil pastel. The foam from her brushed-down hair. Of the past you have given me everywhere, Andromeda, minipops, electronic renaissance. In writing the poem I am playing the cello, I am playing the cello of poem to death, why not?
It’s up to you It’s down to you
Don’t be so mournful…
PART SIX: SCENTED AND GENEROUS
I had a dream about the diary with the days mixed up. Each day had its own fragrance:
Cognac, cannabis, dill pickle, mown grass, libido enhancer, sweet vanilla, jasmine, ylang ylang, who shares all, heart notes of shrub, blackcurrant, oak moss, popcorn, peppermint candy, lavender, ginger castoreum, chypre, neroli, understory, wooded and tonka, ambery, orris, top note, emily brontë rose, cinnamon, hot shit, gold dust, brine of ocean, roast aubergine cologne near airstrip pheromone, oil pipe explosion, special cinders, vetiver, slots into psyche, balsam, absinthe, cassie, frangipani, saffron, strawflower aka immortelle, black liquorice, lactones, myrrh, sassafras, fruit loops, chocolate ice, pamplemousse or french for grapefruit martini and rockrose, peony, tobacco, peppercorn, petitgrain, scottish myrtle and soft fir, nutmeg, new car, coffee brew, pine needles, indole, musk of course.
Pitseleh means little one. Elliott Smith sings, ‘no one deserves it’.
I’m turning a petal to see you better / that I am someone’s difference.
Dear Alisha,
If we were to wed in the childhood memory where you circle the prairie with diet cola and you always know what to do, I see the cherryade reds in you, sanguineous of first degree and alacrity pitching your letter. The post office is closed. I eat more peanut butter than Elvis and nobody stops me, I get it from Aldi. The day feels closure and we edge towards lockdown, I’m texting, Starbucks is open on Christmas Day, will you bring me something? Again, like the time we ordered starlit capitalist fuck lattes and dusted methamphetamine before shift; we were exquisite, fruit toast, the nourishing glitter in our hair was ace; we served 200 covers, sixty quid in tips, and you were scarlet in the uniform poem called A Scarlet Letter. Not the one or the many, just any. I knew this already. We had written them all! You have to have dashes of green to make red, tell Hilary, which is why I am writing to you from my rowan tree, fred asks is this a rowan bush, I say a rosehip, I don’t know what to do; the inchplant is coming up fast, it will ingest the television, I look forward to it. Brockley Station, Nina Simone, stomach cramps, star flood. Must learn how to climb / the branches brightly.
Write to me of conspicuous passions, such as aging, or the fairy fountain with permissible agelessness. Crystal arpeggio. The various glacés of Rome, ornamental corpse flowers, pistachio and your deep, carnal desire to dance. I brush all the sea-foam from the rose-girl’s hair and she would collapse in panic. What the heck is in this carpet. Can you send me again the dimensions, dots per inch in terms of the plant, or planet? There is much to do. I am sewn a yellow word and kissing you cherries to lemonade, black to blues. Needing earth for it, rich stuff, thoughts on allotments. Omnidawn is the word, when the camera pans out and one million people have streamed this song, the credits come up. O blush, Love’s refrain in summer! 500,000 ampersands, can you imagine it? My new grand dreams of porny conjunction…
You taught me how to shoplift the various accessories of girlhood; I’ve given it up. See how my brows disapprove!
December is cruel, the dark green foliage of tinsel and shrubbery, poinsettias, it’s kitsch. I learn a blue-grey song on guitar but it sucks. Mum makes paella for xmas eve etc. Pantone named yellow-grey the colours of 2021, Katy is raging as I might too; I had a poem about this from before f-sharp, it was all about cycling, snapped ankles, absolute melt. Get to you. The way you arc your arms just so is centrepiece: everything will be the same as the sum of it was, serving us dinner. Cryptocurrency, wrong-name, Tony Blair of bad air was trending, you do it last-minute, pronounce it soft, you wear a blue velour lace thing, fka misty. These are the suburbs where doors were slammed, and these were offered cookies. Fuck a lawn. But you dip your feet in scant oasis, you break off a piece of the dark chocolate donut. I have dreamed of this. Stillnesses are not without purchase. Another spam mail arrives, dear pal—
I am going out to buy us blowsy hours, belong and casual distortion. Black forest gateau and log of the roasted poem, emitting steamiest lines, pleasure days, no breaks just ganache is that thick language. We lay together, birthday of shadow work, wrote sunlessness. I draw dark green liner on their eyes like vines. Wish holidays longer. We enter the alone wood with natural lights they are strung they are simple, leafage pressed between them. 1800 dpi, virus gone, unmute the sea. You are warmly invited.
~
Mermaid Chunky – Gemini Girls
‘Til Tuesday – Voices Carry
God Help the Girl – Down and Dusky Blonde
Sunflower Bean – Moment in the Sun
Phoebe Bridgers – Graceland Too
M83 – Karl
Tomberlin – Hours (Katie Dey remix)
Gia Margaret – apathy
Felicia Atkinson, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – And The Flower Have Time For Me
mariaology 