Giraffe
I see that today you look ever so sad, And your hands are so delicate, clasping your knees. Listen now – far, far away, by Lake Chad, A lone giraffe wanders, swaying in the breeze. God granted him poise and graceful, slow airs, And his fur is mottled with magical shapes, A pattern with [&he
(translated from French)
When we were finally dressed up fit for a Sunday, Elsi would drive us to the Auberge du Cheval Blanc, up to the French doors that mysteriously reflected the hill overlooking the hairpin bends of the road. I saw the bus appear over the horizon, the one which Maman had certainly taken. It slowly made
Simple Truths Simply Put
“El mundo cultural que articula la obra, tan distinto en problemática, historia y estructura, resulta en este caso intraducible.” “The cultural world the work articulates, so different in its problems, history, and structure, is in this case untranslatable.” So lament the edit
Waiata-tangi o te moana: The Seafarer
This is my own creative translation of the first 18 lines of the anonymous Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Poem The Seafarer. I have incorporated te reo Māori words (and the occasional OE) in my translation, as I’ve wanted to give the reader a glimpse of the beauty of bilingual expression. The poem is
Shibari Teddy
Trigger warning: themes of sexual assault Last summer, I had an unhealthy amount of sex. I would wake up, meet someone, sleep, and repeat for weeks. This wasn’t new, but the intensity was. It felt like an obsession – more than that, it was a full-time job. The sex itself was new: in experimentin
Searching for Seashells
When we were much younger, my little sister spent one restless summer searching the shore for starfish. She dug her tiny fingers into the sand, gathering them excitedly in a bucket until they dried up, and then cried over their sorry cracked bodies. The holidays that followed, she took to walking th
The Big Queer Monster
For weeks after the release of ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’, Lil Nas X’s Twitter mentions were filled with homophobic slurs and Bible verses. At this point, it’s almost impossible not to have seen the music video for ‘Montero’, or at least the memes of Lil Nas X pole dancing his way
Notes to Shelves
In a cold library – its silence occasionally disturbed by a lone cough or a floorboard creak – you turn over the last page of your book, only to be faced with an argument in the margins. According to one reader, the book is “shitty Marxist bollocks”, to which another has retorted “fuck you
A Love Letter to the Glaswegian Dialect
“DJ Fucking Badboy here Steamin as Shite Am ’boot ti tell you a story ’Boot ma Friday nite…” This is how DJ Badboy’s ‘Friday Nite’ opens – a track well-familiar to anyone who spent their teens at sweaty Glaswegian house parties. I once made the error of writing about ‘Frid