izzy

if I was a pigeon, I’d find the highest point in the city
and come home to roost in it every night
if I was a pigeon, I’d look in all the highest windows
I’d fly through shopping malls
I’d throw myself at windows
I’d fly right past your ear and whisper ‘it’s gonna be ok’
if I was a pigeon, I wouldn’t wait til you were done
before swooping in for the scraps
if I was a pigeon, I’d shit on everything you love.
if I was a pigeon, I’d watch over you.

*

sarah

The following names are now banned on the grounds of being too passive-aggressive:
Chastity
Hope
Faith
Grace
Serenity
Fido

FUCK YOU, MOM AND DAD, YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO.
I’M CHANGING MY NAME TO UNICORN WRESTLER AND YOU CAN’T EVEN STOP ME.

*

izzy

She was going to restock the counter anyway. Updating the milk order’s easy enough – it’s still only 2pm. Shame about all that tomato sauce, but it can’t be helped. She staunches the flow of milk mixing into the red with Wednesday papers. No one ever buys those anyway. The door is hanging off its hinge, stuck in front of the sensor so the buzzer sounds continuously. The air hangs weirdly too, holding onto the aftershocks. The woman had been made of nothing but muscle. Glistening and tan, wearing a fluorescent pink bikini. Her hair bleached white, scraped back into a ponytail held with a scrunchie. Surely it must be steroids or something. She had rippled when she walked. She had snapped the insides of the milk bar in half like tiny little bird bones. Now the bodybuilder was gone and there was only the echo of her cries, ‘look at this body, look at this fuh-king body’ – she had said ‘fucking’ like that, like it was two separate words – and so much spilt milk.

*

sarah

He cried when his father died
which surprised him
he looked into the mirror at his puffy hot face
and for the first time, saw how his nose
was just like his dad’s
and wondered how often the man who raised him
had spent sobbing in bathroom cubicles
while his wife waited outside

*

izzy

tote bag:
I REDUCED MY TRAGEDY ONTO THIS TOTE BAG

tote bag:
GET INTO GOON

tote bag:
PUKE THE RAINBOW

*

sarah

Imagine how different fairy tales would have been if fructose intolerance had been a thing back then.
‘Snow White new face of FODMAPS diet.’
‘Heracles disdains 11th labour, citing fear of gastric cramps.’
‘Eve lectures snake: ‘I don’t care if it’s the fruit of knowledge, I can’t eat that shit.’’

*

izzy

Jordan Prosser succinctly deciphers the heart of seminal network TV shows:

“Fronds”
A sitcom about 6 different types of plant life living in a New York apartment, navigating life and love together.

“Grazier”
A hungry cow juggling their professional and personal life against the backdrop of 90s New York.

“Steers”
A bunch of male deer who hang out in a New York bar. “Grazier” is a spin-off of this show.

“Crill and Grace”
The enduring story of Deborah Messing’s ‘Grace’ and her microscopic crustacean best friend. Also the first widely watched sitcom to feature homo-crustacean relationships.

“How I Met Your Mollusc”
A sitcom and a love story, it takes hopeless romantic Ted Mosby 9 years to find the Mollusc of his future children.

*

sarah

I sewed a spare stitch into my shirt
to remind my heart never to tear

*

izzy

‘How do we collect so much bullshit over the course of our lives?’. Alice doesn’t mean to be particularly critical or negative as she thinks this, it’s simply a question. This is a crushing weight. Alice thinks how lovely it would be, how neat, if someone had an answer for this, a straightforward solution or a simple formula. She would really like some water. Maybe that’s all they’d need to solve the crippling tonnage, the emotional blockade colonising the houses and minds of the people on ‘Hoarders’. The only water she can see is a grubby puddle a few feet away. If we definitively knew how it was we ended up trailing so much junk behind us, surely we’d be able to make concrete decisions about it. It’s getting hard to breathe. Perhaps there would be a printed guide to let you know whether you needed two TV sets or three, or a new one. It is a bad sign when you breathe and your ribs don’t move. A desktop computer. The weight is unbearable. A laptop. It’s starting to shift. A tablet. This is a landslide. A smartphone. She’s almost under. And of course, a landline too. Swallowed by it. An abmaster pro. The husk of a microwave blocking the last of the light. A bread machine. She’d always wanted a bread machine.

*

sarah

Well there’s a burnt butter moon riding high up tonight
burning cigarette holes in the black velvet sky
and it’s time for the show out on Marylebone street
where the gold-painted strippers are coming alive
and the tired old businessmen are opening wallets
and digging through pockets for rattling change
that the dry-cleaners left when their suits were last done
and they’re hoping their wives don’t clue into the game
all the thighs of the women are snaking up close now
and the music is moaning, it sounds like it’s crying
the lights sputter down through the haze and the incense
and the sirens are dancing for a million eyes
a corseted redhead begs a man to untie her
and his fingernails snag on the knots in the ribbon
he whispers denials to his lover back home
in the back of his head as the silk falls away
the glasses are ringing like bells chimed at Christmas
and the teetering barflys are grinning like wendigos
god comes up strutting and orders a whiskey
and settles down central to take in the show

*

izzy

I want to say things like ‘fear nothing’ and ‘there is nothing to fear’.

I want to shout, ‘it’s me, you guys! it’s really truly me!’.

I want to art so hard motherfuckers wanna fine me.

I want to stare so hard and so long the sun starts to blind me.

say ‘fly higher’, say ‘dive deeper’, say
‘don’t pick the scabs’ but also
‘scratch the itch’.

*

sarah

Spring is in the air, and on the wind I remember
that party on the hill, surrounded by strangers and thick teen sex
pot smoke sending terror into my little girl guts
and alcohol smoking into my grown girl chest
staring into the darkness and feeling the new vibrations of loneliness
of wanting a person to press between me and the night
of feeling stranded in my own body, the wholeness of youth run away
later, lying quiet in a flimsy green tent
pretending not to hear the awkward wet kisses
and hushed hot breathing from the two teens beside me
feeling the stars fill me up bright as day
and empty as the universe

*

izzy

I love your immensities.

all the things that cannot fit inside you,
all the things you cannot put to rest in me

the parts of you that expand and reach
that cannot be contained, even by the sky.

*

sarah

Little love, we are so far from heaven
and when I press my ear to the earth
God has stopped calling me home
we are adrift here, in this ocean of sorrow
with our compasses cracked and old
I am the stillness in the morning
I am the smoke on the air
I am the whisper in the darkness
and I cannot save us from ourselves

*

izzy

There is a single piece of popcorn in here with me, on the tiled floor. If popcorn could look sullen, this would be it. No – accusing – that’s it. I’m sitting in a toilet stall at Cineworld with a single, accusatory piece of popcorn and the door is sighing open because the lock is broken and I couldn’t be bothered moving to another stall. I can’t stand people who take food into toilets. Someone brought their popcorn right into this cubicle and placed it on the floor while they did their business. It freaks me out. Drinks not so much, for some reason. They really should have the candy bar after the toilets at the cinema, to avoid this situation. Maybe that’s not good business practise. Maybe the toilets need to be protected from people who aren’t paying customers. The door is wide open. There’s a short, squat woman in her mid-fifties looking at me with her lips sort of pursed in horror. She’s not moving, just staring, and the moment seems to stretch. It looks like she’s stapled her décolletage to her neck with gold chain so it can’t run away. Her white capris are shivering. Her gauzy zebra print blouse flutters under the fluorescence. I stand and slam the door in her face, hear the shuffle of white kitten-heel sandals stumbling backwards. The popcorn is still looking at me.

*

sarah

I smelled the smoke on the air a mile away
and so when I arrived home, I was ready
stepped over the charred threshold just like Bruce Willis would
gazed coolly at the smoking remains of my bedroom
took grim pleasure in the twisted face of a childhood doll
brushed ash off a photo of my family just like Hollywood taught me to
and had a good breath ready for the piece de resistance
dropped to my knees in a safe patch of ground
hinged open my mouth, turned my head to the sky
and screamed, just like Leo Dicaprio
screamed ‘FUCK
YES
FINALLY’

*

izzy

sext:
I want to eat fuet off your hod bod until neither of us can move.

*

sarah

Everyday bragging rights: I remembered to clean the toilet bowl BEFORE I’d gone to the toilet, and so I didn’t have to deal with wet flakes of disintegrated toilet paper smothering the toilet brush.

*

izzy

sext:
I love you like the silence after a storm.

*

sarah

This year, kids, we’re getting a real Christmas tree and we’re going to put it right in the living room, right in front of the tv, and we’re going to sit underneath it on Christmas morning and we’ll look into each other’s eyes and see that glorious tree reflected right back. And we’re going to leave it there through December, while it slowly turns brown and harsh, and through January, when the heat bleaches it, and through February, when it’s shattering the carpet with discarded needles, and on and on as it slowly dies in front of us, turning sick and black and dead in the middle of the room, and that is how we will remember every day, every single goddamn day, the way your father fucked his marketing manager the week before Christmas and ruined this perfect family once and for all.

*