First published on 14th June 2021. Full text of the poem is available in MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture.
Tag: poem
(NEW PAMPHLET) Polychromatics
SNACK DROP!
A new pamphlet-length poem, ‘Polychromatics’, responding to the textile and ceramic work of Anna Winberg, is out now with Legitimate Snack (Broken Sleep Books).
Cashless, the snow fell in your dream
three million times osculation
of this surface once was grass, soft silhouette
in pink snow. I scoop masses
of this snow
to carry around for hours.
🍬🍭🌨️🎨🍬🍭🌨️🎨
Paper: Gmund Cotton Linen Cream (110gsm)
Cover: Pastel Pink (210gsm)
Endpaper: Pink Gold Vellum
Titles: Gravesend sans (Medium, 8pt)
Text: Mokoko (Regular, 8pt)
Thanks to Aaron Kent for gorgeous assembly & publication!
Order for £6 here.
(NEW BOOK) Sonnets for Hooch: Lemon Bloom Season
Mau Baiocco // Kyle Lovell // Maria Sledmere
[56 pp. // A5 // Perfect-bound // Run of 100 // 17/04/2021]
Announcing the first of four seasonal pamphlets of sonnets, written in collaboration with Mau Baiocco and Kyle Lovell.
Available to order now at £6 inc. UK P&P.
~
Praise for Lemon Bloom Season
Like a liquid prisoner pent in glass, I once thought the sum total of human ingenuity was Fanta Grape. And then I read this collection, the perfect expression of what it means to write your poems in the mouths of your friends (as I think Derrida said). You know the part of a poem that stays at the bottom of the bottle, collects as crystallising residue? If you read these poems out loud for long enough, the sounds train your tongue to flicker in there like a lizard and the why of the world just fizzes and melts.
– Colin Herd, author of You Name It (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019)
Of all sciences, is our Hooch poet found at the highest. For they doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any person to enter into it; nay, they doth as if your journey should lie through a fair orchard—at the very first give you a cluster of lemons that, full of that taste, you may long to pass further.
– Sir Philip Sidney, author of An Apology for Poetry
When put to our focus group, seven out of nine consumers agreed that the tasting notes for Lemon Bloom Season were long, smooth, and ‘distinctively yellow in its language’. One consumer attempted to quote Roland Barthes. Another consumer attempted to put forward a new theory of ‘Bitter Poetics’, before being given some more Lemon Bloom Season sonnets. Everyone was glad.
– Philomena Zest, SMOOCH™ CEO
Playlist from Hooch Launch Party
Sample Poems
This Place is Rammed
It’s Aries season and here’s a poem for Colin Herd’s birthday last week.
🔥♈🔥♈🔥♈🔥♈🔥♈
This Place is Rammed
The canteen was a dream canteen. No, it wasn’t on Mars!
I sat beside Colin Herd in a supervision that seemed to exist
horizoned on the kind of table I want to call cherrywood
is the word for anything darker and
sweeter than pine. He asks
if I’ve been writing lately. A poem, “The old
acid pit of the heart.” I turn sideways
to offer him a Ready Salted Walkers Crisp.
We talk publishing. I am courageous and yet
worry about waiting for lunch.
“O happy birthday!”
it occurs to me
that I am a day or so late.
I know he’s an Aries because
everywhere in the dream I see red.
It’s so busy. We’re not even
just a vibe. The packet
of crisps is obviously red. The flames
in new-lit candles. The irate cadmium
aura of waiters, who should get better pay.
I’m wearing red corduroy flares
like in the Bob Perelman poem
we heard last spring on Zoom. I’m showing
a loss. Is cherrywood red?
I’m stuck in my chair. The sound of the crunch of
the crisp is red. Colin’s drinking
a bright red thing with Campari & grenadine
Denise would approve of. Everything
is totally youthful. Will Colin eat
the big slice of blood orange?
Tell me a glorious story!
New publication: Miss Anthropocene
Miss Anthropocene is a selection of short lyric, ‘ethereal nu metal’ poems responding to the Elon Musk/Grimes complex, from intimations of emerald fortunes to billionaire shares, conceptual infinity and big e-girl energy. Through academic research, poetry and music criticism, I’ve been hinging on the ‘miss anthropocene’ project for some years now, and the arrival of Grimes’ 2020 album of the same name, on the brink of pandemic lockdown, was the final impetus to write this. Responding to the record’s conflations of misanthropy and our current geological epoch, Miss Anthropocene explores weird desire, gender, material intimacy, temporal distortion, apocalypse vibrations, pop music and a petropoetics of excess and residue within the frenzied dramaturgy of late capitalism and climate crisis. In lieu of the doom scroll, this is a post-internet ecopoetry of ‘massive dance lament’, lyric survival, surface tension, sexy ambience, dreamplay and visions.
56pp / 148x148mm
Perfect-bound 130gsm (silk)
200gsm gloss cover (gloss-laminated)
£6 including UK P+P.
~
To order a copy, paypal
mariasledmere[at]outlook[dot]com
+ add your address to the note.
For delivery costs outside the UK, drop me an email. 🙂
Playlist: December 2020
PART ONE: FLOWER NEUROSIS
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 Sylvia Plath. 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
Massive Attack – Black Milk
Björk – It’s Not Up To You
Cocteau Twins – Orange Appled
Yaeji – When in Summer, I Forget About the Winter
Laurel Halo – Blue Notion
Sun Glitters – Somewhere, Nowhere
Robin Guthrie, Harold Budd – Beau, As In Beaumont
Lana Del Rey – Summertime The Gershwin Version
Joan Baez – The Rose
Karen Dalton – Ribbon Bow
Lucinda Williams – Met An Old Friend
Pinegrove – Morningtime (Amperland, NY)
Elliott Smith – Pitseleh
Vashti Bunyan – Here Before
Zoee – Used
Julianna Barwick – Inspirit
Pelican Tusk – Not What You Meant
Neutral Milk Hotel – Where You’ll Find Me Now
Cloth – Old Bear
Lawn – Rats
Mush – Revising My Fee
Big Thief – Not
Joanna Sternberg – Don’t You Ever
Belle & Sebastian – I Don’t Love Anyone
Bloc Party – Waiting for the 7.18
serpentwithfeet – mourning song
Magic Island, Zoee – Agony (Yung Lean cover)
Anna Burch – Can’t Sleep
Kelora – Ultramarine
Playlist: November 2020
Surf Rock
for fred and kate
Lioness chained to hillsides of lavender the sun
is streaming oversea entirely conceptual homeland
5G howl like how a fractal glint
constitutes one or more endings and is just
never never never never never
lavender exactly who unimaginable loses
when fox does borrowed snouts
language of flowers fuck this howl
again five dimensions
Is you said to me a common placard
stands vantablack in the manacles jason cries
his heart broke in your jaw I swam all night
to the motor show roseate perfume of the
problem being born out of lobster wedlock
to be ravaged by the neo-marxist programme of
naming us wasp and other wasp sadnesses
it is for me as I for you better at swiss twilight
when I was community
In the womb wept effort of what insomnia
does
from the latin meaning wandering
policy of “rural lust” I will swim
I will swim through hedgerows I will swim I swim
this isn’t the song turn up your sleeves we enter the
chess in brightness mode I wanted the heat the reat
skelped by autofictive descent
another coxcomb
texts you back O lariat
At that altitude paying the rent in pale world
and even if she has lost control
what a car does in green light heaven
obscenity pedestrian the ground here opal silicate
owing you a crush moratorium
cheques out after all
this is just a modern rock song
adjusting styles pane of my old wound, new wound
at clydebank the skycastles at four o’clock who are u
Harvest season was accordion sonnetry I lifted my
volta skirts for assholes feeling perennially strange
in melancholy chord progression of certified orange
is this out of the question lazily in the grass
lexie and cecil and ariel open your mouth
be lucid
corduroy when stevie sings
harmony on thursday morning exhaustion I thought
just swish would do it
Could be 1995
how will I get there painting the ice-
course with fairways is all that I have
boygirlboygirl varieties of noodles
bunny calls it cloudheartedness
be mute in serious leaf together
is falling
the same as time at all / it got claws
hi can I have some more bourgeois heroine pastry
Okay to just swim and arrive here my salty
fiancé is a type of fish did you enjoy The Shape
of Water and other films to which I might fuck
glitching in the real world
darling is a missing numbering
merely the sun streaming feminine voices
never never
a century of the Laurieston & all of my guinnesses
are oxygen saw another fox
And wherever you are I suppose the squirrels are
listening
as bartender came home w/ three crystal ocean
we stub the ashes out
we stub the ashes out it’s him
that I am smashed mezzanine phoning my dad
big blue energy
another song about the suburbs / mineral & gem
sometimes I can’t believe
Red lions and lionesses are not metaphors but love
laura no lies & lilac passion in the first place
I wrote about you in my notebook: we might not
even be awake in the world is still in the kitchen
scratch at my socialist lichen
second paramore whose kisses are
madness my counsellor said yeah
I like those mornings also
London fog, London fog
~
Oneohtrix Point Never — I Don’t Love Me Anymore
i_O — Castles In The Sky
Quirke — Luxury Red Pence
Mogwai — Dry Fantasy
Salem — Red River
Songs: Ohia — Lioness
Silver Jewels — Federal Dust
Johnny Flynn — Lost and Found
Keaton Hensen — Ontario
Life Without Buildings — Sorrow
Drop Nineteens – Winona
The National — Dark Side of the Gym
Weyes Blood — A Certain Kind
Marika Hackman — Playground Love (Air cover)
God Help the Girl — Pretty When The Wind Blows
Porridge Radio — 7 Seconds
Elliott Smith — True Love
A. G. Cook — Beautiful Superstar
Bat for Lashes — Peach Sky
Lemongrass — Sayonara
Tennis — Tender As A Tomb
The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)
Golden Mean — Midnight
Phoebe Bridgers, Rob Moose — Punisher (Copycat Killer Version)
Angel Olsen — New Love Cassette (Mark Ronson Remix)
Belle & Sebastian — This Is Just a Modern Rock Song
The Overlook
I remember burgundy jumpers
I remember the sleeves of them
I remember the wet feel of wool in my mouth
I remember sucking pencils, taste of lead
I remember when tall people gave me badges, they said FUCK ESSO
I remember how the oven door never closed
I remember lighting the back with a long match
I remember the feel of it striking
I remember sunrise from bus stops
I remember it all morning
I remember they supposedly fucked on the green
I remember the security cameras, all six of them
I remember bottles of cider the size of a baby
I remember being cold
I remember being so cold I thought I was dying
I remember being this cold every day for a year
I remember when the bottle smashed in front of me
I remember wearing everyone’s clothes
I remember when he fit his fingers around my thigh, at the highest part, and they touched
I remember the colour of sunsets and ocean spray
I remember cranberry juice
I remember that song
I remember listening to the sound of a tape click over and over, softly
I remember using too many purples
I remember being told about liking petrol
I remember the first cigarette, menthols by the sea
I remember when someone said poppers were moreish
I remember how she did her makeup, turquoise glitter gelling almond eyes
I remember shoplifting bourbon
I remember endless packets of gum
I remember an abstract notion of madness
I remember the expense of American candy
I remember the headless cyclist my brother saw, but I wasn’t there
I remember a series of accidents
I remember the muscles in my legs were so weak I could hardly walk
I remember illustrious textbooks
I remember falling over in the deli, very subtly
I remember when he pushed me over
I remember black coffee
I remember safe foods
I remember being sick
I remember eating three pieces of cake
I remember throwing away
I remember the chord progression to the song called ‘Angels’
I remember the virgin who wanted to know
I remember telling her
I remember being in class and infinite and nothing
I remember the feeling of three tongues in one mouth
I remember pissing against trees
I remember pieces of crisps stamped into carpets
I remember the invisible bugs on her palms
I remember selling bracelets of luminous, plastic materials
I remember light-up trainers
I remember hot soup
I remember vodka for lunch on a Wednesday
I remember they knew my name on the bus
I remember coming online and seeing you
I remember this
I remember holding them
I remember being told I’d fail
I remember failing
I remember failing to fail
I remember taking the train alone
I remember glossy pages
I remember wanting to be warm enough to bare my limbs
I remember nothing but
I remember the river was all that I was
I remember walking my dog the morning she died
I remember a rainbow
I remember the bruises
I remember the bruises all over my breasts
I remember biting my arm not to cry
I remember weeping all winter
I remember the welt
I remember he bit the inside of my thigh
I remember feeling dumb
I remember the empty train
I remember being illegible
I remember losing my grammar, my handbag
I remember that winter it snowed forever
I remember counting tips
I remember we said sorry to each other
I remember it happened again
I remember holding your hand so hard
I remember it not being you
I remember fireworks from the library
I remember that friend’s apartment
I remember hot water and lemon
I remember backcombing my hair
I remember messaging you the morning he touched me
I remember not wanting
I remember stupid bowls of muesli
I remember the smell of linseed oil, white spirit
I remember being thinned, and thinning
I remember the lyric
I remember the clarity
I remember yesterday
I remember the time you drove all night
I remember the dream where my hair was three times longer
I remember we made it to the beach
I remember being told my kissing was good
I remember gold stars
I remember so many stars
I remember gasping
I remember being so thin the air passed through me
I remember that too, the wind
I remember thinking that girl took crack
I remember the word capsule take shape in my mouth
I remember asking for it
I remember not having asked for it
I remember getting it anyway
I remember being turned over
I remember the river inside me as
I remember that picture where I stood in the river
I remember wanting everyone inside me, I was so hungry
I remember a dress code
I remember the unreal election
I remember the absence of insects
I remember the first time, you said
I remember we should have done this sooner
I remember the hot bright sense
I remember falling out of the hour
I remember the view
I remember he didn’t come
I remember coming home
I remember not wanting to
I remember the burning look in her eyes
I remember being sorry for something I hadn’t done
I remember dropping it boiling on my arm
I remember stripping off in the kitchen
I remember the phone call
I remember the gentle white lie I carried around all year
I remember a series of elaborate bandages
I remember more than a friend
I remember avocado emoji
I remember I knew it all
I remember telling them
I remember this one cool trick for making it pop
I remember your irises amethysts
I remember my blood
I remember the word ember
I remember saying a sunbeam
I remember red velvet
I remember you well in the Ibis Hotel
I remember the size of a blouse
I remember she said, it’s worse over there
I remember a hip flask of whisky
I remember a docile reply
I remember falling asleep with the bass underneath us
I remember Arran
I remember Luss
I remember wearing skintight jeans
I remember graduating into the falling leaves
I remember falling up stairs
I remember the clots
I remember my fingers in your hair
I remember being golden
I remember doing it again
Remember I wasn’t there
*Written in response to a writing exercise during Tawnya Renelle’s workshop on Memoir and Memory.
Playlist: September 2020
Darklands
what if she entered
the sliver of morning and haemorrhage
left for her
on the rooftop, signal
that someone was still coming in caustic shoes
theorising a free continuation
of handsome disorder, to access the paywall
and free us from pain
she could breathe here, just
to feel like getting trains, filming herself
speak only to speed
and lag
in practice of relative motion, to feel it
“how all the protests ceased”
but not to look
was to watch the hard tomatoes soften from green
and the weight
to glow awhile, orange
and I miss
a strategy of oratory whereby someone has a line
from beautiful afternoon television, like
“who would buy this house?”
as if there were choices
next to the undiscovered
shaven lawn
*
I’ve been having dreams about family
and scaffolds
how she just lay there
literally
until the child began throwing soft toys at her
in the 1990s
anyone could come to life and be numb
I want to read Graeber’s thesis on magic,
slavery and politics
she didn’t say to me
do you ever feel free, for instance
in fugue state when brushing your teeth
I’ve been dreaming about ancestors
stuck on trains
killing rabbits and eating crackers
it was that easy
all season
complaint of what’s coming, knowing nothing
of photography
when you can’t measure the wind
by the grass
she had this enormous laughter
*
dwindling into ambivalence
if this isn’t a dream exposure
and we can’t enter houses
I’ve been trialling sentences, Bernadette Mayer says
I’m not faulting being periodic but sentences with caps and end marks do seem so bloodless to me
You swing gazelle legs over the actual
You wait in the room for the wine
You pull collectives out of the sink
distracted, I watch through windows
turn on my flash
to lead workshops on trash
and poetry as finance, like
eons of speculation
had brought us to nothing but numbers
and the anxious among us, cooking the numbers
I watch her slice an avocado in the dark
and the police van
opened to reveal us
with leaves in our molars, perfect hello
it’s autumn
in the bloodless sentence
*
dreamt I was tidying the rooms
of siblings
this mad kind of everywhere acid
I couldn’t clean up
in the panic of rich, linguistic Monday, you are
part of the story, too smart for me
the interminable smell of pine resin, kimchi
and menthol gum
yes, just there
in lightness rimming
I made this commitment to sleeping ‘upstairs’
taking pleasure
on my editor’s credit
before the treehouse snapped
*
I can barely listen to music anymore
it’s all error
describing her pain as shooting
when I smashed my thumbs in my eyes
you kept going
it was Jupiter
now
cruising down Alexandra Parade to send you
the voice message
of not seeing nightingales, a bathtub
attached to a car
I wish I could touch
between times is when I most feel ‘we
exist’ and just like that
the cornflowers won’t die
and we can’t enter houses
and you end
with the fresh heat of illusory commute
I could say anything new
in dumb, erotic anonymity
where all this falls
*
she had lit up the sad remains
of the tree
bound to other seasons, even look good
despite not hearing this live
I like it, finally
summer light on the same
even if we live
in adrenalised versions of trying to keep warm
on the video call
or wavelength
of audit continuum
she was all
“it is up to the unassuming […]
to represent reality”
in The New York Times
and the well-oiled loss of taste
feels the same
the shadow
years of tax avoidance
edible sundown
*
what if she knew before all of us
doubled in running away with me
I dream all my friends
attending the burning
“where have you been”
and you could put this to archive
swipe left for the hidden
indentation of nothing happening
20,000 years ago
mostly I worry if she lived in the dream
I had to wake from
cradling the ersatz animal, sprigs of rosemary
having clambered reality over again
and knowing you survived the scaffold
GESTURES FOR LIVING AIR
as the art was told
“I just need to check
your temperature”
a rough kind of festival kiss
that was listening
in the underpasses of everything
prior to millennium
installs a magical feeling that
:heart:
you would be at the station
and my bouquet emoji of blood
flowers await.
💐
Fenne Lily – Solipsism
Sylvan Esso – Ring
Gus Dapperton – I’m Just Snacking
Sufjan Stevens – Run Away With Me
Fleet Foxes – I’m Not My Season
Chastity Belt – Ann’s Jam
The Durutti Column – Sketch for Summer
Frog – Photograph
Adrienne Lenker – anything
Tim Heidecker, Weyes Blood – Oh How We Drift Away
Bill Callahan – Sycamore
Gillian Welch – Picasso
Margo Guryan – Why Do I Cry
Norma Tanega – You’re Dead
Elliott Smith – Speed Trials
Kath Bloom, Loren Connors – Tall Grass
The Jesus and Mary Chain – Darklands
Alice Boman – Heartbeat
Edwin Organ – Self Alarm
Broadcast – Echo’s Answer
Cocteau Twins – Aloysius
Yo La Tengo – Bleeding
Perfume Genius – Valley
William Basinski – Tear Vial
Oneohtrix Point Never – Long Road Home
flotsam
flotsam
‘Hear me, hear my silence. What I say is never what I say but instead something else. When I say “abundant waters” I’m speaking of the force of body in the waters of the world. It captures that other thing that I’m really saying because I myself cannot.’
— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin
— Adrienne Rich, ‘Diving into the Wreck’
On becoming a body,
the little abundant shines and its pores are clotted with dust.
I saw what sound it was a wave makes
when startled by gestures towards this torsion
a long beach, the false irrigation of beautiful islands.
The melody was a long intimation of losing faith
in what is meant by a certain colour, not
this blue which runs in the prussian rain.
I want to run up the spine of your back
and settle the amygdala city, tie
my lyrical wrists in mobius fibres
and return the rights to speech.
Do you want to continue?
He was born and beautiful,
he might have seizures. We interfere in definition.
The depression of time is a beautiful curve
in the small of morning, named
after the call you wanted.
Blue dust of feeling.
Blue dust of biblical name.
I worry for his tiny heart.
Glycolic, afloat
in the radical millions
when I say this bird
is a nameless bird, plotting
and pecking the wreck
I go down
in such hunger
I go down
without formula.
Not this.
The world is stuck.
I sing to you
in the echo, in the rich
and greatest loss.
Who hurt us?
I had a dream we were swimming
in the San Pedro Bay, just like the video
it was almost sunny. There will come a time
when my car won’t start
if I ever have a car
in a lightless world
the structure of passion is a ritzy hotel.
Your hour is a fucking astronaut.
Imagine Disney injected
arterial dreams
this crudely.
Imagine a fire in the minibar
at the back of your mind.
As the relation to your wreck
I call it ship, I still want
the elsewhere conduit of thoughts
to sign my brain as treeware
in the black black gold
my oleochemical, fear of soap
and gaussian world is a kitten.
She burns it all up.
On becoming this back-lit
history of pixels, we pour into jars
the last of sea-glass, liquid shingles, I cut the bird
into salad I cut this sort of pristine hope
to feed the kitten.
I thought the picket
was shining in rain, a sound.
Something is drawing us out.
I make a romance from your shoes
and the kissable way of these days
is a no-show, mewing, the marketing
of genital shame, the apocalypse breakfast
tastes of salt. Come back into my life,
I always found you
with a breath laced in pesticide,
a currency of morphine
dreaming me
back like a thrush, I want to wreck
the multitude of this song
with its hyperthermia, its oil-made
hide of feathers.
You want me to be less literal,
littoral I like your wildlife.
Lighter, somewhere
what we see
without reason.
What can soak
up the dark this good.
I like your messages.
I like to react with my abstract halo.
The rediagnosis read depression, to kill
not clean the long and beautiful rain.
Prising the daylight from its packet
I want April, a lot
of lilac song.
I go down to the nervous water,
deep in mammalian blood
I am, I am
not breath, not bird
west coast
my body is a poke of air
in the book. And it lets in
the crudest wind, reminder of gold
in the room where we woke up last October
in my father’s house
in the valley
where frost never leaves the cornicing forests
or sets its voice to speak
for the sodas and junipers.
If we could just avalanche into orange
like the song, Mount Eerie would be a genuine place
to kill or not kill the birds we oiled
in the prussian rain, they gleam
like unemployment
doesn’t in the colourless streets.
We share a little nest
of noctilucent materials.
I was jobless
as the natural light, listening
to your comedown opening chord
which is to say, I think we should stop
seeing, I think we should stop
seeing at all. I roll around
in the oil of this
happiest adderall
to sob uncontrollable
to stop trying to see you
as snow,
if a former love should fall
very cool, like a two-minute Uber
costs less than lunch.
Ducter, he
could break me
the ultimate mosh is us.
I have said that he could and he could
I have said that too much.
To float like capital
back to your panic
I smooth my sleepless residuals.
Ducked it, ducked it
you come back, holding a blink
to know
that time is a gleam, we had a guest speaker
passing out in notional
structures of passion.
I wrote everything down.
It is a wreck to think in the beautiful rain.
It is all that dissolves
to remember
I hope to meet in code someday
again, to set this
in parenthesis, very lightly
choosing to run
the artificial palms
horizontal across your eventide.
This was all ours in the poem.
Prospering, we’d know
each other
so much more than mineral
in the flotsam
way, a lot of coffee
fills our faultlines
and the tar sands sing, and the quicksands
go astray, what of the waters
don’t touch what we were
to sing something
hurting, to rainbow
the quoted weight of your heart
is only debris
I go so long in the rain
to break her
I go so long in the run
as to make a beach
in loops of oil
to empty my purse
of mermaids, to feel like
the only decorated islands
in the United States of America.
*
This poem was written following a talk I gave on Energy (W)rites: Telling the Embodied Stories of Energy, as part of The Curatorial Fellowship: With the North Sea series at Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen. It responds specifically to Lana Del Rey’s ‘The Greatest’, where the mournful twangs of a classic rock ballad play out over sunset scenes of Long Beach in the San Pedro Bay, whose four decorative ‘Astronaut Islands’ were built in the sixties to camouflage offshore oil derricks and muffle their sound pollution. Classic rock is a genre and industry founded on oil: vinyl is a type of plastic made from ethylene (found in crude oil) combined with chlorine (found in salt). PVC, the resultant material, is a highly toxic form of plastic, for both our health and the environment. Perhaps it’s only ‘natural’ that Lana would style a kind of vinyl-nostalgia to sing of various kinds of tainted existence. If her earlier work was dubbed ‘Hollywood sadcore’, we might note this recent aesthetic shift as something more like ‘anthropocene sadcore’: where the cinematic eulogising of wasted youth, ‘the greatest’ American Dream, is played out against the false beauty of late twentieth-century petroscapes. But alongside oil there is also water, and the brilliance of light, tone and pigment. There is haze and trace and repeat. Lush tints within variant opacity. A khoratic space where the colours soften or harshen into each other and something of form is held between, with varying paleness or intensity. It could be Billie Eilish singing of ‘burning cities / And napalm skies’ in the apocalypse unconscious of her song ‘Ocean Eyes’; it could be a flare of orange burning into Grimes’ ‘permanent blue’, its elegia for opioid bliss and extinction. The weird pleasure vistas of a scene we can’t quite name. An improvised blur or break. What the water speaks as a force of shimmer. The accompanying visual works are by multimedia artist and sculptor Jack O’Flynn.
