You can
start a fire
without knowing how
to build one

Your mouth circles mine
hunting for the wildness that grows
like a vine in my throat
your jagged teeth cut into my tongue and you take what you find,
like a scavenger
a vile of blood, licked from my lips
the corner of a smile, burnt heart
the bread and bones of me

sorting through stained jeans and shirts

I remember her

pink gingham dress and gnawed knees

from the floor she scrubbed

removing traces of brown blood
where she bled for

him

(for God)

swallowing sins and secrets,

the ****** Mary merely

a memory

to her.

I select a pair with ripped shins,

hand over my dollar

anticipating the anarchy of bare skin and ribs

(once fleshy)

protruding like

a ***** before

(Christ)

and I am not

that girl

in the thrift store

pressed palms

praying, praying, praying

for the taste of a

saviour

Old enough to know better but young enough not to care,

I hold onto you like water clings to rose petals

a heavy due

in the morning, we take coffee with cigarettes

we exhale, eyes watering

two smoke rings blending then disappearing into the

ether

a missed opportunity, passes

we are joined at the hip, hip bones grinding against each

other

and in these shattered bones we build

a fire, a house

a home

As the oily substance hits my bloodstream

my insides shudder

concrete setting into the stem of
my brain

Peter Pan taps my window, inviting me to

fly

but I can barely walk

atleast

I am free of unlaced shoes

of licking blood from the corner of my mouth

bitten lips and chewed fingernails

seventy five milligrams
of sanity

With a fish bone as a hair piece

she trawled the beach for clues,

a shell, a seaweed skin

the sea spread out and she held

the entire ocean in her mouth

swirling it around her crumbling
teeth

like a fine wine, red and ripe for spitting

out into a plastic bucket

that a child holds in their clenched fist

a mind full of castles and building

and I wonder what we are building

busking outside the mall on even

days of the week

a handful of copper and occasional silver

she runs sand through her fingers

then water

what does she see in those tiny grains of

glass

what does she see in

us

cigarette stained fingers grab at golden hair

she offers herself to God, in martyrdom

eating the bones of Christ
(bruised flesh as a summer dress is torn)

drinking the blood of Him
(cracked hips, buckling)

she swallows, white salt, burnt throat

imagining herself, developing in a dark room

red

and swollen

he lays her out, pinning her lemon dress out to dry

hot Summer sun soaked skin

and cotton

torn

crucified, ***** nails (his) forced through her hands

blood (hers) running down soft thighs

he puts out his cigarette in her hair

before hacking himself a souvenir and handing her

to God

(unflinching)

The edges of one body blending into the bones of another

spreading like fire on a terrace of thatched roof houses

we are learning how to count in twos, in pairs

we are moulding into the shape
of a house where children run, barefoot

we are learning how to build ourselves out of ashes and fractions

out of crumbling teeth and rotten mouth kisses,

halitosis

I was plucking out weeds from between the concrete patio slabs. You were watering the tulips and tending to the vegetables.

We could grow enough to live off, you say sometimes, when the whiskey trickles down your throat and the fire licks your belly.

The belly of a man, heavy set from years of sugared, milky tea. From using his hands to build the house we live in. To build the room where I am standing,

with its beech furniture and scrubbed floors, it's nooks and crannies which make it impossible to keep clean.

All those years, washing when the weather allowed. Picking colours from a paint chart. Talking passionately. Loudly and quietly. We even talked about the weather, sometimes. You made poetry out of the atmosphere. But weather changes, rapidly and without warning,

the gentle wind you once called Odin's daughter has morphed into thunderous roars, shaking the walls you so carefully built around us.

we are ******* hard at the sky now, gasping for air. It is raw, unsterilised air, that burns your tongue as you breathe it in,

yet breathe it in we must.

I wonder who we are now. Weather beaten, windswept tourists. Should we have left this place years ago?

We scrub the floors. We mow the grass. We wait for something to happen

next.

We mouthed what we wanted to say,
or else kept our lips locked like ventriloquists,
as we tried to send electric shocks through our fingertips.
Our life wires connecting under the sheets,
through the soft cotton fabric lightly brushing our knees.

Who are we to deny it's charges?

The trembling that starts
in our toes and rises like water
through our veins,
as warm as wine,
filling our bodies up
with the kind of love
you only find on postcards.

Are we just on holiday?

(J'ai demandé à la lune,)

am I too cold for you?
why won't you wrap your arms around me? Unloosen those limbs like a tree shakes off its branches in the wind.

do you not own me enough? Twenty five years of children, houses we don't own, school plays and split pay checks.

twenty five years of mixing you cocoa every night, adding the cold milk and sugar that makes it palatable to you.

a king sized bed, with blankets and comforters. Why do I need to be covered by your body, wrapped in sky blue silk?

you should be warm enough for yourself, she says. As she passes me a glass of picnic basket wine. I turn my head.

there are fire flies to catch, bees circling the grasses we're about to drink from, a blue dragonfly.

(il était seulement une aventure.)

The shoreline gleams around us, winking beneath the sun. I think about how it meets the sky and the reflection of something beautiful on something wild.

What does the ocean say about us?

You are hoping the rain will stop, as we wonder ideally across the sand dunes

a cliff to climb, a sea to swim in, a beach to build sand castles

and claim with a flag.

I have stopped hoping for it.

I surrender to the summer rain splashing my shoes,

to the sky that darkens through the lens of my camera

a macro shot of a crab, pinched and poised to

attack.

we think in lumps of time, all of us. Great lumps of time

defined by birthdays and religion.

Winter whispers in our ears, a whiff of cinnamon

in the air.

and though you hope to hold it back, with your fingers in the dam

I tell you, again, that we are not ruled by

the sea

I am eating when you call.
I let the phone ring out and the answerphone click,

and flick you off, a speck of dust on my shoulder.

I treat you like an unpinned
grenadine, desperate to throw you into the crowd,

but fear makes me clutch you, tight. As I place the ***** of my feet on burning coals. One step, then another, mind over matter.

Until the words that we once held deep in our throats burst through the dam

and I walk into the sea loaded with rocks, drinking the salty ocean one gulp at a time, so I don't have to turn around and

face you

I unfold in the Summer.
I collapse, piece by piece
into myself

I stare at the ceiling for days,
else pace the floorboards
getting splinters in the soles
of my feet

I mix a drink over the plate filled sink, I don't take care of the basics.
Washing, cleaning...

I neglect it all. I stick to drinking gin from ***** mugs. I was drunk then and I don't think I've sobered up

a decade of paint striper and counting coppers, of wine soaked breath and flinching

sometimes I eat. Swelling my stomach with half baked bread. Too hungry to let it rise

I stand, stock still, under the moon. A whisper between man and man. A backfiring car. A memory...

it still hurts sometimes, when I move. So I wear cotton. Do fabrics have innocence? Do colours?

lemon and orange. No more siren red

(I spread)

He must have loved you, they say to me now. People only **** the ones they love

or the pretty ones

(and I am not a pretty one)

I understand a flatline
soap scrubbed hands punching chests
the sound of air escaping in a last breath

I can grieve
black hood and buckled shoes
kicking up dirt in the cemetery grass

I thought I had time so I held off saying it
as your congregation sent you inky kisses and prayers

everything is bleached white and sterile, we choke down chemical soaked breaths

holy fools that come to take you
bone by bone

salt crystals form on my eyelashes
as if I've drunk the sea

I am swollen with bread and wine
and sins

the weight of the three words
I didn't say
catch like pills in my throat

I splutter and cough but there is no
shifting them

just the shifting of tectonic plates as my world starts to move

without you

With lips that challenge the
reddest of wines

she drank from the cup that was offered, without question

it was sweet. Sickly sweet and dark

dark sugar, the colour of ***
drips from her mouth,

she wipes off the evidence with a snide smile,

a knowing scorn. Almonds

ground up and mixed into marzipan

covering cakes, full of plump fruits soaked in brandy

take a slice. You have your cake now

eat it.

The arms, legs, heads
were covered in clay
but their bodies
hadn't decayed.
They were trapped
in ice, transparent,
clean. That is the role
of bodies. To be seen.
That is the role of
children. To sit
quietly counting
coins. To brush
the long blonde
hair of their
sister (mother.)
To not be heard.
The dead leaves
of trees are
too loud.
Crunching under-
foot. Who am I
to investigate?
To take samples
of hair and
skin. To match
DNA and finger-
prints. No, the
ice should not
melt. As it
struggles to
survive in the
sunlight. The bodies
thaw. Heart first.
And I am trapped.
plunging the
secrets of rope
around throat.
Of stab wounds
and bullet sites.
And the blood
is so cold. So
very cold and
unforgiving,
unmissable,
uncharted,
until my hands
slice,
sift,
silence.

I belong to the State,
to these nurses who force milk soaked bread into my mouth

to these slaves who stuff trains
with beaten bodies, on to doctors who amputate without anaesthetic

to hard labour and hunger.

my blonde haired mother carried me
in her ayrian womb

Illegitimate.

some are kidnapped, blue eyes
running with tears as they

grab (carefully)

I am banging, bending, breaking
under the weight of their promise that

I am special

and I am proving my right to exist

to be spared
sterilisation, extermination ,
to not be a genetic undesirable
a gas chamber child

no, I am free
to sleep, to eat,
to breathe

allowed to live
because I am a
Lebensborn child

Summer. A time of strawberries
and cream smears. All that time, grass licking my thighs through my cheap lemon dress.
I am as bitter as that lemon. Skin peeling, peeling, peeling
back, revealing segments of a girl. Bruised with memories and the moments where time stood still. I am bored, bored, bored out of my mind. Weeding, cutting back hedges and picking blackberries. Holding your hand as you shiver with a summer chill. I wipe the sweat from your brow, imagining I'm wiping away the years. Do you remember when we'd chop wood? Splinters in our fingers and rough calloused hands. I remember it well. Why ever did we stop? Building us a home. Is this just a pause? A tea break. We drink tea together, sometimes, over newspapers. I pretend, pouring milk, measuring out sugar. My hands covered in evidence. Dripping with your DNA. You don't know how easy it is to ******. To shoot. To poison. To stab at organs. Your swollen heart ceasing to beat under my fingers. Your liver leaking. Some do it with knifes, kindly. Others with a wrong name shouted in ecstasy. A wet towel on the bathroom floor. Kids screaming in the backseat of cars. I grieve at your funeral. I scatter your ashes on the moorland where we used to ****. My black dress catching in the branches of dead trees. I grieve. I practise looking mystical. Mythical. Solemn. I hold my head differently, now, and I am bored, bored, bored out of mind.

He lived his eighty years well,
they said

he often knotted his wrinkled hands around the smooth fleshed hands of his grandchildren

still, his heart gave out eventually,
swollen with love

I went to his funeral, a bystander,
an intruder of grief

I take flowers to his grave,
purple tulips with petals

that eat up rain clouds
and sunlight like a ****,

taking nourishment from
the red and white roses that
neighbour them

photosynthesis,

I recall the word,
from chemistry classes
an age ago

I never knew him, though
I got his name from a newspaper obituary I ideally flicked through at 4am

I had never known old age, you see
and it seemed beautiful to me

Breakfast is the hardest meal,

silver spoons scraping China bowls

coffee, black, sugared
swirling down into my ragged stomach

I want to burn down this kitchen
with it's stove and kettle that
unsettle me

floorboards scorched with my hot feet, a thin grey dressing gown that hangs

limply around my limbs

I want to sit at the breakfast table and scornfully scratch hearts into the wood

there is no love here

only bowls and spoons
kettles and stoves

A black voice,
thick with the promise of a new life

a better world

enters me

I am that world
I am that voice

sifting through brown earth
with my bitten fingernails

I explore
hungry for treasure

and tomorrows

but I am just a smuggler
intent on bringing

the past with me

land sharks

that follow the scent of blood

and I am always bleeding

I smile and wait for the Autumn,
for the long breaths and deep pauses of Summer to fade

I sit on the porch swigging spirits, but the ghosts are within me and not
without

I swallow pills,
one blue, two white
two round, one flat

pills to stop my heart from racing
pills to stop the twitching
pills to **** the memories that lurk, like dark men in alley ways

he was not dark
it was not an alley way

there was no long grass to lick
my body, no rough wall to bruise my back

no, it was not outside at all

laying in a darkened migraine room, wrapped in a filthy sleeping bag

whilst strangers laugh in kitchens, smoking *** and drinking beer

but I still know the weight of a man leaving a bleeding, stinging, ****

and the frantic showering off of evidence

I will be asked if it was slinky and if my lips were scarlet

I will cry into the pillows I wish he'd smothered me with

every Summer, I will sit
and shake with memories

as if the very sun were to rub salt into my wounds

I will count out pills, swallowing them with lukewarm water

and I will wait

wait, wait, wait

for Autumn

I crave
to sing
my sadness
to sleep

suffocate it
with my
pillow

they tell me that
it's chemical

or that everyone
is sad

I am a child
in a summer
dress

a young girl
smeared in sugar
white powder clinging
to the edges of
my mouth

burn it
bury it

another pill?

go sit in
black chairs

and tell your
deepest
darkest
secrets

to a kind stranger
sitting opposite
you

take a train
take a plane

walk, stamp, squash
it into the smouldering
street

some people so like
the smell of
molten tarmac

as it sticks
to the soles
of shoes

an imprint
a remnant

a ghost

A kiss is just a kiss
they say,

but your bones shudder
against mine

as your tongue guts out
the trenches of my mouth

counting the cavities of my
sugar wrecked teeth

I want to believe them
(I think)

as I wear your shirts, long and hanging by my hungry thighs

love notes carved into my flesh

scars that stretch, like rubber

and the bitter aftertaste of
love

leaves me shaking into your
skin

the edges where I end and you
begin

I have tasted
air where wine
once was

sobriety, they call it

no more dancing drunk
and brainless

the battle of thought and
feeling

raging on

as they force feed black coffee
drenched in sugar

sweet, but sweat
like

I favour gin
with whispers of whiskey

my left leg shaking
stomach swollen

I feel my glands swell
swell, my eyes puff
out

my chest loosen as
my morals tighten

dissociated daydreams
fade and reality
sharpens

sobriety, they call it

the slow death of
knowingness

I have tasted war

in the acid gasps
and swollen glands

in the crunching of
crumbling teeth

in bruised knuckles that force
themselves fiercely down throats

in fingers dripping with saliva
and sugar

in the scent of bread baking
slowly in the kitchen

that has become my
battlefield

I remember counting pennies
with the wrinkled hands of my grandfather,

gnawed fingernails and cracks full of antiseptic,

hands that had once held a gun steady now shake with effort

bronze circles of currency stacked in piles of ten,

ten fingers to wrap around a hot mug of coffee

black, four sugars, as milk has started to curdle in his age wrecked stomach

we count, we stack, we wait,
we laugh as the pounds pile up,

ten,

ten fingers to fret the instrument his protruding ribs have become

ten fingers to hold as the IV goes down

ten fingers to mould dough and break bread, like his wife did before she

stopped

ten fingers for doctors to tap on
blue, collapsed veins

ten seconds to share his strung out last breath

ten fingers, ten toes, keep moving

Wild colours of rage
stir in my heart
when our lips
meet

months back
we were neutral
blue

slowly
the yellow of me
wrapped

around the green
Earth of
you

& now brown
live wire wraps
around my tongue

& I can taste
the electricity
of love

I think of you in that poppy field
your red lips bleeding secrets,
emerald stalks, blending scarlet scars into flesh. My cold shoulder
when I turned my face away

it seems like a trick of the light, now. When I reach my fingers across our bed, tangle a lock of your hair around my bitten fingernails

we pretend to forget the little things, like if we take sugar in our coffee or who's turn it is to take out the trash

we promise to hold onto the best parts, as if we are dolls that can be dismantled and remade by the hands of a child

but it's the laughs that disappear first, like the poppies whose petals we blew away so carelessly,

thinking there was a whole field when really there was just

us

I think of that green eyed
jealousy eating your heart.
The bitter pill that slides down your throat into your stomach acids. It rattles like dried peas
in a metal tube. Your fingers fret strands of my hair and I wince in agony. I am desperate to be held by another. To mix in with the marrow of their bones. But you are emerald and full of poisons. Spreading a plague of pitiness. I hold your hand in mine, still, but I pray for broken bones. Fractures. Splinters. Nails ripped clean off and blood. Thick, warm blood.

A candy striped knitted blanket covers were frail thighs,
resting underneath her hands that have baked bread, dug earth and planted tulips.
Hands that have stroked the head of a new born baby, still glistening and ******.
Hands that have crawled out thirties Jewish ghettos.
I reached out to touch them and she turned to me and said,
'Even my wrinkles have wrinkles'

It scares me when you smile at me,
white teeth remind me of scaling cliffs
pink lips are ribbons tied around a car crash tree

I am afraid of you, deathly afraid
as I wrap myself around you like a vine, holding you at your word

tightening the ropes around your heart as it beats out a rhythm to the pattern of my breaths

I hold each one in my mouth, circling it, like wine, into the crevasses
I spit it out, then
and forget the taste

but I can never forget
your pink lip, white teeth
smile

I won't forget the night I learnt how to fight,
how I kicked my high-heeled feet and kissed the night

there were patterns in the sky,
from stars that weeped as I dried my eyes

he said I'll walk you home, and I said fine
I never thought that he'd be mine

or I'd be his, tied to his bed,
scarlet lips begging to be fed

I found my feet alright, that day
as I let him have his way

when he was done I felt like Pan,
one wish away from being a man

it was over, my heart stirred
and cursed the fact I was a girl

Women tell me their stories.
things that ring like a bell;
an alarm bell, a warning.

What happened to me isn’t unique, I found
yet still. It is mine.

Lips, thighs, softness
hair, mouth, coarseness
*******. brains, burnt out

I can hear the blood pounding in my ears
as he goes down on me.
Down where I wither and die

These men are not monsters,
yet they loom with the rope of a hangman,
black hoods, black boots and hands
That throttle our throats, bringing death with them

They do not know that this is a relief
for our tongues to swell in mouths until we can no longer
breathe

We marry them, sometimes
thinking they won’t turn on us
that they will keep us warm and safe

We go to their beds, willingly
at first,but later we are forced
down onto the rough carpet,
where our thighs smart from the fabric,
the friction

Mostly, though
we hurry past them in the street
clutching our keys between our fingers
as they lurk in dark corners

But we cannot escape them
these men with the power to end our lives.

I talk to these women and find their stories stirring in me
each word filling me with courage
Yet we know, we all know, that sharing words is not enough
to stop these predators,
these sharks that hunger for our flesh and blood

we can only re-pin our dresses, make up our faces
and face them

I conjure you, out of yellowed newspapers and matches.
I come to recognise the scent of you, through which you untie the core of me. I swallow you down as the hoards devour religions. People banging on the doors of churches. Swallowed up by scripture. I wanted to see God, caught between your teeth. To cut out your Adam's apple and place it
between my lips. Consuming your masculinity with a single, careless kiss. Anatomy's foundations rocking like an antique chair. Stripped wood that still sings of trees, chopped down in their prime.
This destruction of youth that should sicken me, thrills me to my trembling bones. Each blade of gentle green grass,  grows in the sunlight and I pick
each daisy as carefully as I pick from the throng of young men that hound me. Voices ringing, reaching, touching
silk sheets, glistening with sweat. I lick the knife, metal caressing metal, blood on steal.

I am ready to receive him.

I cried for you
a flash of silver
between my teeth
lips, scarlet and drip-
ing

at seventeen I knew
the weight of you,
each hair on your arms
as you pressed my back
into the stained carpet

the Japanese tattoo
that struck me,
tracing the thick, black lines
with my eyes

a quick glimpse of my
grandfather, mixing bread
with milk and whiskey

flowers that grew, evergreen
in the garden where
he'd chase me

laughter ringing through the air,
cheesecloth blue dresses
and black, buckled shoes

you eat me, heart first
then each sense in turn.

I welcome the loss of
them all.

The touch of your
nails in my thighs. The
taste of blood as your
rotten mouth consumes
my own. The sound
of flesh beating flesh.
The sight of sweat beads
resting on your brow. The
smell of ***** seeping
through skin.

In a moment
I am no longer
a girl

but a woman eating
the words off my clothes,
smarting, sinister ****

a ***** kitchen floor
is waiting. The cool relief
of the tiles on my
burning skin

and a reflection of a woman,
no longer whole, yet still
alive

Red nails between stained teeth
Biting.

Orange wool skirts that scratch thighs
Itching.

Yellow youth that sits, back arced like a cat
Wasting.

Green fingers that grow roses and vegetables
Watching.

Blue lips that kiss cold mouths
Freezing.

Indigo jeans that fade in sunlight
Warming.

Violet eyes that flash with goodbyes
Leaving.

How quiet it is here
now that the yellowness of
our youth has withered

I do not complain,
for I see your kind, soft eyes
smile at me across the room

I hear your heavy breath
as you inch your way
closer

the wheeze that whirls
from lung to air,
on a breeze of long -
suffering longing

I hold out my wrinkled hand
to touch your paper thin skin,
trying hard not to bruise
or break

and you take it, silver flashing
between your fingers as you
stab, stab, stab

my chest

as the pills reach your stomach
and you wrap tight around me
holding, holding, holding

onto my heart

Prozac killed the poet
with it's blister packs
of two times ten
every twenty eight days
taken twice a day
with water

They came again
last night.

Eyes bulging
as the air was forced up
through their throats,
out through their
silent, screaming mouths.

The more I pressed,
the harder they kicked.
Muddy grass flying up into my face.

My veins are a chemical mess,
lust, lunacy and loathing
coursing from my heart
into my blood.
Filling my body up
in the absence
of love.

I can taste it,
as the bodies seep through the walls and windows

I can remember
the moment that
life left them.

I like to think
of myself

as a fruit
you've plucked

or a vegetable
you've pulled

from the ground

Sweet and Spring like

I fit into your hand
like a bud

that you make
blossom

I want to be
like the heart
that beats in
your chest

thud, thud, thud

never knowing
that one day
it will

s
t
o
p

You are oxygen,
giving life to
a fire,
to a girl
who will reduce you
to
ashes

You are gnawing me down
to the bone

bones

grinding, marrows mixing

blood

red blood that trickles down
my chin

the taste of iron and oxygen

you were my first, you know

(no one will believe that)

blind drunk and filthy finger
nails

scratching out the letters of
my name

my heart withered and weak

ribs breaking under the weight

(the dead weight)

of a man

Voices come and go
with the wind
a light breeze
spinning leaves
amber, scarlet, evergreen
I know I need to hear
you voice, with it's
hooks and snares
that clip my heart
I know I need to feel
your skin, your silky
touch that sends icy
shivers down my spine
I know I need to see
your eyes, haunted
hunted, hungry for me
I know. I know.

I know

I heard you liked to
save, that you called yourself
a saviour

so I pulled my knees
tight to my chest, rocked myself
to sleep

grew my hair long and dyed it
gold

found an oak tree to tie my silk
scarf around the strongest branch

my neck poised, like a cat
ready to pounce

and waited

now, they're out with torches burning
voices calling my name

in the soft leaves of the forests
they look for footprints

and I

foolish and desperate
cling to you, like an icicle

(fitting for our frozen hearts)

and I have been lost

or stolen

But then
in a moment
you were an un-
pinned butterfly

like cigarette smoke
chasing the stars

and the scent of you
made my heart
swell

pulsing red with longing
and beating, beating out
our names

I can hear my mother laughing,
as my father washes his filthy knuckles

I remember, the scene of what I thought was love

how she handed him his jacket
every morning
and how he kissed her cheek goodbye

the way slept together
their lungs synchronised
'Breath in, breath out'

and when he gave her the fat lip
because the brandy brand
was wrong

or because his shoes were ruined

I still thought,
as only a girl could

love is not without pain
but pain is not without love

My body is uncharted territory
(You wish)
A map that teases - taunts
(He said)
The road to Armageddon is paved
(With love, my dear)
The touch of an unpainted nail
(Scratched into my back)
You are mine, now
(Unpin your dress, my dear)
The Holy man slides into me
(I sing a psalm to calm him)
Thrusts and moves
(Blood, deep red, flows)
Kisses me with whiskey lips
(The wrinkles around his eyes)
Exit, stage left, you breathe again
(Ssssh, be quiet my dear)
Unconvinced ears, hostile eyes
(I am real)
Birthing women turn their backs
(See me)
Virgins untrap their wings
(Believe me)