izzy

Clack of bone on bone, scent of dragonbreath and sweetbread, ‘fetch me another tea, dear?’ and the claws, the claws, the claws. They still smoke. Knit one. Eyes slide around young blood. Pearl two. Piles of doilies, jumpers and Pom Poms. A patchwork of quilts and a million po-faced dolls sprawling over the ground like so many dead, so many prized hides as they feast on 50cent lamingtons and sigh. Booties to keep little chubby bubby bits warm and a scarf and a bobble hat for the kids and a jumper grinning square clown teeth to stuff the stockings. Thin fingers wrapping around yarn like a long lover’s trist – the perfect wrists to give your neck a twist. ‘It’s ten dollars for the beanies love’.

*

sarah

God had called it a day, and the world was ruled by terrible beasts with wide smiles of toothy splendour. The earth was complete, and time stood still, smoking a cigarette in the heart of a volcano. And all was at peace as violence shrieked through the hazy hot foliage and small scaly things scuttled under the feet of giants.
But Myrtle couldn’t cast on her knitting. There was a fetching scarf she had in mind, blood red and snug as a skull in its skin, but t-rex arms are doomed never to meet, and try though she might, she couldn’t get the wool on the needles, and damn God, damn the universe, damn the clocking off of time, this fucking scarf was getting made if she had to wait a thousand years for her arms to slink out of their sockets and reach for the sky. Myrtle was evolving and she didn’t give a fuck who she pissed off while doing it.

*

izzy

grind my insides up like you are diamonds
and I am sand and rocks turning to dust

crush my centre into little sparkle splinters
broken glass that sings and shimmers

grind my bones into glitter

*

sarah

You know what? I don’t want your fucking cronut.
I don’t want your quinoa and massaged kale salad.
I don’t want raw high vegan paleo bliss balls.
I don’t want a banana and a plate of chips.
I want to sink my teeth into your collarbone and feel it break in my jaw.
I want to suck the marrow out of your fingertips.
I want to feel your arm hairs sizzle in your forearm skin crackling.
I want to jam a fork between your ribs and lever out your arteries.
Calories don’t count when it’s true love, baby.

*

izzy

I’m wearing a jumper with waves on it so I feel like I am made of waves and I’m walking up the hill because that is what you do here. Sandwich and a camera and a pocketful of trail mix and a – fuck, I forgot the water. Hit the top. Sit. Taste of spit turning white and gluggy. Chew. Swallow. Chew. Think. Admire the roll of the hills through slatted eyelashes. Sun lashing my back, trail mix in my curled fist. Mountain and me. Hill, if you please.

*

sarah

I wonder what I’d say at his funeral. Something like ‘He was the best one, you know’, while feeling the eyes roll in the audience. ‘He was the kindest’ – yeah, right – ‘the sweetest’ – sure he was – ‘we had the most beautiful’ – fuck off, everyone’s a saint when they’re dead. So perhaps then I’ll stiffen up, sniff a few times, clear my throat. I’ll say ‘There was this game he played when walking past restaurants. He’d look in and find the people eating alone. Usually older men. Usually, and let’s not let death make us saccharine here, usually overweight older men. Eating alone. And he’s stand outside the windows, just behind where the saffron light fell on the pavement, just far enough away to avoid steaming up the glass, and he’d imagine what his life was like, the patron. The patron sitting at his table with his napkin folded into his badly ironed shirt, nursing a glass of wine, could never justify a bottle, see, staring into his plate of calamari or spaghetti carbonara or whatever it was, and standing outside, this figure in the shadows, he’d stand transfixed imagining how lonely this guy at the restaurant was. How he’d had a wife, maybe, but she’d left him, and his kids never saw him, and he’d tried internet dating and failed, because the world was too cut-throat for him, and all he wanted was someone to smile at across the table, all he wanted was a soft sweet hand to brush his over the salt shaker, but he had nothing, this guy, this lonely, desperate, milky-white man sitting alone in the corner table of this cheap nasty restaurant, and standing outside, these thoughts burbling through his brain, he’d get so upset, so desperately empathetic for this imagined life that he’d cry. He’d honestly make himself cry imagining this man’s sad cruel life. And when I said ‘You know, some people just like eating alone. Some people are on business trips’, he’d reply ‘Of course, of course I know that. But I think of these stories, and they just, they just break me, you know?’ And that’s who he was. He could be an idiot, and unintentionally offensive, and just plain dumb, but he had all this kindness, this empathy in him and it just seeped out like that. At men in windows of restaurants. Nursing their forks and their slow beating hearts.’

*

izzy

It’s not like we would’ve gone any slower even if we could’ve. Your face gets all cold from the rush of it when you’re going down and sometimes you skid a bit and maybe even some leaves slap your face but I wasn’t focused on that this time. My eyes watering a bit, peering out of her slipstream and the warm weight of her hips pushing into my forearms was like the best thing ever until –
it’s not the gravel that’s the thing. Like, it cuts you up and maybe takes a bit of a chunk outta you and you bleed a lot but it gets better. It’s not the gravel that’s the thing, it’s the drop. The sheer fall tumbling down past all them reaching white skeleton trees. That’s the thing. That’s the thing that’ll get you. I haven’t looked down yet to see how she landed. It’s been a while. I keep seeing the image of her sprawled down there somewhere and – I dunno how long exactly, but a while. It’ll be fine. I’m gonna look. She’s gonna be fine. White gum spindle-fingers and a slash of blue sky and. She has to be fine.

*

sarah

I never trusted my flat-clap shoes to hold me
and my scab-sick knees to keep on folding,
accordion-esque, once the blood stopped clotting.
I never had enough hair to hide behind
and my nose was less a button than a squashed pink sore
I was never the ingénue, always the nerd.
And so the nights never called to me, lilac-heavy
bitumen-bit, never whispered in my bones
and saw me leap from the window-ledge
into the sap-dense arms of the night.
I never could fit on the hard steel handlebars
without tipping off sideways
but I can still kiss like a teenager
with overwet lips and too much tongue
and my heart clawing up like a cat in a sack
so come dink me a while on your thighs.

*

izzy

She sticks a swab in my mouth and wiggles it around so I can taste the powdery blue of her gloves, feel the weird stumps of her fingers sliding up under my lips chipped and crackling. I think about biting her plasticine flesh fingers.
‘That’s it, all done,’ she squeaks like a fucken chew toy.
Her tits bob as she stands back and I watch. Think about shoving my face in her cleavage, her gripping the back of my head with rubber-gloved blue hands that don’t slide. Can’t feel. Think about ripping her buttons off with my teeth. Bitch.
‘Won’t take long. D’you want a cuppa while you wait mate?’
I spit on the floor, right next to her black polished boot. Far enough she can’t do shit. Close enough she knows. Her badge glints. Tight black hair shines.
‘Suit yourself.’
She goes and I want her to come back. Cuff me. Hold me. The walls bend and glow. Useless dried up hag thinks she own me, think I’d listen to anything comes out of her shrivelled mouth. Time drips like sour milk.

*

sarah

There’s a string of spittle suspended from my lips hanging half an inch above your eyes and we’re frozen. Neither of us breathing. If I try to suck back this bubble-foam rope, it’ll snap and come to kiss your contact lenses, shatter your dignity, spray lunchtime’s garlic toasts across your wrinkled nose bridge. Between my thighs I can feel your stomach start to shake with the effect of keeping in two pints of old oxygen turning bad. I sway my head side to side like I’m listening to old music and the spit-string wobbles like you’re the pit and I’m the pendulum and it’s getting lower with every swing. Your eyes are starting to go red as carbon dioxide invades your retinas, bursting blood into the whites like tree roots in Spring. I’ve been raking my gaze across your face, across your pinkening cheeks, your six-year blackheads that you never let me squeeze, your shitty-shaved stubble and then I lock on with you and stare. A bubble seeps out between my lips. I make sure I’ve got your full attention, make sure every pinprick of you is looking at me, and then I open my mouth with a laugh like ‘Pah!’ and I watch in slow motion as the filthy spittle snake goes rushing out into the freedom of the air and down towards your horrified eyes.

*

izzy

I’m standing out the front of the bank with one hand on the trigger and one hand in the air.
Look back, and you – caught in the doorway, grinning like an idiot, dribbling fat wads of cash that slap like fat fish onto the marble doorstep. Half expecting you to throw your arms up high, spray money down these steps and scream ‘Fuck capitalism! Fuck the patriarchy!’, your eyes glinting like diamonds, you look a million bucks babe

BANG.

Blare of sirens, hot-footing it down the street you right there, you right there behind me, like I can feel your breath on my neck, feel hands run over my belly one down between my legs, one up to grip my chest. Like I can already taste your sweat on my tongue.

BANG.

Money to burn babe, money to lie on, money to throw out our revved-up, top-down chariot. Just you and me babe. Just you and and the road babe. Sky’s the limit.

blank.

*

sarah

I am my own outrageous little ecosystem.
Here are the storm clouds puffing out of my ears.
Here are the tides rolling sand across my forehead.
Here are the ferns creeping softly through my sinuses.
And lo, here comes the summer sweat, lo, here comes the rain.

*

izzy

She can dive a little deeper every time until finally she can see the rooftops, finally feel her hands run over pitted concrete and avoiding the gaping glass teeth. One floor at a time, she clears the buildings out, dizzied by the depth, skin puckered and peeling when she bursts back to the surface. She wonders if she will ever have children. She wonders if they will scavenge slowly like she does, bit by bit, or if they will learn to breathe this water and soak the salt into their skin. She wonders if they will start to call the water home instead of missing the rutted rocks and the sand and the dirt of the land like she does. If they will catch fish between their teeth, ripping at them with webbed hands. If they will recede back to some rougher primordial state. If they will love this rolling water globe.

*

sarah

This was the day she got home early and cried tracks in the dust on her face, and liked them so much that she varnished her cheeks and kept them as exhibitions of her grief.

*

izzy

You can’t see me, so don’t try
I’m lost in the undergrowth now
growing creepers up my arms
flowers out my ears –
you don’t know?
I was lost down here so long ago
rolled in the dirt and the undergrowth
helped into earth with a loving hand
that now I’ve forgotten how to stand

*

sarah

Tell me a story. Once upon a time.
Once upon a time there was a monkey called Geoff. And Geoff was the CEO of an enormous multinational monkey corporation called ‘Geoff’s Bananas.’ And they basically were involved with importing bananas. There was a little bit of diversification into, into, um, other sorts of – wait for it – monkey business, but mostly they just imported bananas. But! They had a lot of structural problems and their bottom line was not very healthy – basically, Geoff was eating all the bananas, and that was really affecting their bottom line. Eventually they went into receivership and they had to liquidate all their bananas in a big blender and they made a smoothie out of them. They liquidated their assets and made them into a smoothie. And that’s the end of the story.
What a good story.

*

izzy

He woke to feel a cold drip falling steadily on his forehead. Right in the centre. Smashing up his chakras. Holding his frontal lobe to ransom, forcing his eyes to blink and his cheeks to wince every time the next blow feel. That, and the smell – acidic and fecund, ripe overflowing like sickly Vermouth. His tie was choking him, but he couldn’t move his hands. He knew they wanted answers but he didn’t understand, so he closed his eyes and wailed, he closed his eyes and cried. He closed his eyes and shut his mouth and asked the darkness why.

*

sarah

When the hurricane comes
it will be cut-glass and golden

belching life into the dry cracked places
an avalanche of terrible fecundity

the insects will flourish, naturally
fucking and birthing and dying, teeming

the bloated men and women will float on by
with shiny blind joy in their maggoty, bigoted eyes

*

izzy

Su-su-su suppose there was an easy way to fix this
To scratch and drop and fade and remix this
Suppose there was a way to make history her story
To unburn your fingerprints, to dig out some glory
Drop this like it’s hot, too hot to touch
Stop pretending a wink and a nod is enough

*

sarah

Ha! Ha! I can punch chicken dinner boxes and feel like a hero!
I can karate kick pot plants until they shatter and I don’t even bleed!
I am the steel bodied boy with the titanium smile!

*