Sometimes the wind whispers, calls through the trees, whistles through cracks and we listen for danger, for tangible nightmares. A footstep on the stair, a scratching at locks. Sometimes shadows play death upon the bedroom walls and we wonder which darkness is safer. We forget the many names of bravery. We forget valour can … Continue reading Ode to being brave
Landscapes. Portraits. Canvas dripping watercolour or squirming in acrylic. Paper pores closing their mouths as the smell of life turned cold permeates the room. Paper pores squeezing their eyes shut tight to the darkness. Colours greying with the damp running in rivulets down the walls and they breathe - collapsed lungs beneath wrinkled skin. Landscapes. … Continue reading “I would imagine death as a cellar full of paintings”
A response to Pocket-Sized Feminism by Blythe Baird I learn and I leak. There are holes in my feminism and my palms are overflowing with missed chances and silence. I learn and I leak. Damp settling into my bones and my third eyelid crease but I refuse to be wallpaper - (watch me … Continue reading I learn and I leak
“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.” And then let me weave a tapestry from those very words and show you cities with golden temples, disappearing skylines and naiads bathing in flowers. Let me tell you a story of ignorance - of blissful wildfulness to love ourselves to destruction. Let … Continue reading Live and let tell
“I will see you tomorrow” was our parting promise every day at the crossing; you went one way and I went the other but I watched as your hair bobbed along and disappeared with you up the hill and round the corner. At twelve years old I believed in this moment like buried treasure, … Continue reading A goodbye is always an ending
A. B. Cofer’s Not Enough, Just Enough is the first poetry collection I have read which strikes the beautiful yet painful balance of healing. Although Cofer masterfully considers the dark and the light, she also explores the grey. Opening with ‘depression’, Cofer immediately establishes this collection to read for comfort. I would say, at times, … Continue reading Review of Not Enough, Just Enough, A. B. Cofer
They say loving and being loved are not the same. They say it is better to have loved than to have not loved at all. They talk about endless love and until death do us part. They talk until love is nothing but an abstract noun with ill-fitting clothes, and the dead are … Continue reading End(less) love
If you turned everything you read into thread, and sewed a sail, would it unfurl with holes or billow in the wind? Would it carry you someplace new or catch the same drift and spin you in circles until you were green; sick with more than the sea? Poem: © Kristiana Reed 2020 … Continue reading Sew me a sail
There are too many empty spaces. Desert stretches of things we ought to know; movements and people and crimes we should have learnt as well as Wordsworth’s daffodils or the world wars in Europe. We are accompanied in our centric - lonely in our fight against all things ‘not right’. And our British tongues … Continue reading Crude Vellum
Let’s burn ourselves beneath the stars, peel away the layers of sore skin until we are nothing but dust - cold, unfeeling light intertwined like struck matches torn at the edges by the fire between us, between our lips, between my thighs, love me and extinguish me, wrap your arms around my wilderness and free … Continue reading Sunburn
