What Remains
A pink scarf he bought that first Christmas together. Not that she ever wore scarves, which was why he’d bought it in the first place, and why he shouldn’t have bothered. (It snowed that January – more sludge than snow, really, the kind that produces muddy, misshapen snowmen – and sh
For a Mourner
If I’m in the right frame of mind, I can still picture the old Whitechapel. Back then, there were no sleek walkways as there are now, and the current, chic, steel arches were made of sandstone brick, darkened by soot and grime. My father lived in the area from when I was seventeen to twenty-four,
Lavender
I would love to tell you of the softness of the night. I want to write of the way the sky shifts through a thousand velvet, silken blues, the pinprick stars drifting through its infinite expanse like fish through the ocean, slowly spinning around me. I want to write about how the cast of moonlight [
Keratin
At night I dreamed we lived at the bottom of a lakebed and I braided your hair. My child fingers, thin as chopsticks, weaving in and out of your mass of tangled curls. Underwater, your seaweed hair floated around your head, your pale face haloed in its soft cloud. Your closed eyes like a dead [&hell
There isn’t a difference between a body and a daughter
It started with a white morning like a blind eyeball, the blankest of sleeps. And it started with sickness: Hanna wasn’t there. She was old, she was going deaf, and she wasn’t well enough to face the freezing mornings in the clothes bank, with the women who became desperate as they waited, who t
Plague Addiction
[CW: drug use] I have a complex relationship with Gower – that vindictive old man – late-medieval English poet, moralist, and reactionary. He is someone I would usually despise, not least because of his belief that the peasantry should be “bound in chains and under our foo
The Cabin
We had parked on the road heading west out of town, alongside the railroad tracks. Ahead of us, the dusty streets gave way to pastures, which in turn gave way to wooded mountains, cutting a crisp horizon. Mackenzie lolled out the passenger seat, and Bailey skipped between the car and the road. I wat
The Partisan
Given the perpetuation of disinformation and the influence of Roko’s basilisk, it seems to me that this story, which I have already erred in telling, is not quite the truth. The events herein take place in a moment of repression and rebellion. We speak of a nation divided, and a small group with a
Medusa
CW: Discussion of Sexual Assault I look at you, but this trick only works if you look back. * In first year, we read the work of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Both believed (or so we were given to understand) that text had a sex; every work written was shot through with man. […]