izzy

I wanna yell ‘FUCK YOU’ from the top of a burning building
I wanna yell ‘CAN’T YOU SEE WE’RE BURNING?’
I wanna yell ‘CAN’T YOU FEEL THE HEAT ON YOUR FACE?’

If I Had A Gun, I wouldn’t shoot it
but when you don’t see your targets as human
it’s probably a whole lot easier than I can imagine

Not All Men tell the other half of the world
that their lived experience is non-existent
or unimportant, or that it’s cool, we’re equal now
because this is how you slowly make someone believe they’re crazy

the Rape Joke is that it’s happened to most of us
even if it’s hard to call it that
even if it wasn’t as violent as we expected

sometimes I wanna scream ‘MENSES’ or ‘MISOGYNY’
from up here on the ledge with the wind crying too
because these are the pains in my gut that won’t go away
and they’re sort of interlinked

and I feel like yelling about things doesn’t change anything
especially if no one is listening
but it can make you feel better
even if you’re just getting the echo back

*

sarah

There was something gothic about her silences
About the way she could carve a moment into soot-singed granite
Dust it with snowflakes and, just in case you were getting too comfortable
Spatter it with a rain of birdshit

*

izzy

the sea is thrusting itself against the base of this island
smashing over the rocks and into the sea walls
like it thinks this persistence will be rewarded
like this is the only way to get what it wants
like force is the way to a land-locked heart
that maybe just wants to stand
and greet the sea in its own way
or not at all
the Earth is 70% water
slowly chipping away at the land
sucking away the sand banks
pulling the rocks under
these human bodies are 60% water
we are made of the same stuff,
us and the Earth,
us and the sea the same
but when you look out at night, you can’t see any horizon
just ocean, everywhere
turning the lights off
trying to blend itself into the shore
dashing the edges to sediment
trying to swallow us whole and take us under

*

sarah

I had to blackmail you into getting out of bed this morning with the prospect of your own inexorably approaching death
I think I am correct in saying that we have officially reached crisis point

*

izzy

tension between arid earth and heavy sky,
taut and hot and making the air expand
until eventually the sky gives in and breaks
pours itself down all over the scorched dirt

*

sarah

I have invented a new type of Swiss Army Knife.
Gone will be the scissors, the blade, the file.
In their place, a rabbit’s ear. Soft and lucky, to remind us that superstition can be a comfort in the face of cruel realities.
Tucked in there, too, a bell, to sing out in joy, to solemnly toll grief. Its peals will carry great distances, to remind us of the power of truth.
Folded away also, a single warm sock, humorously coloured and carefully knitted to remind us that loss is inevitable, but so too is love.
The corkscrew can stay.

*

izzy

1. I want to look up videos of baby pandas and show them to the whole cabin, because they seem tense. ‘LOOK AT THIS BABY PANDA, AND TELL ME IT’S NOT THE CUTEST THING YOU’VE EVER SEEN’. You can only get internet in the air on fancy airlines. Ryanair is not a fancy airline. It is the exact opposite of a fancy airline.
2. Flying over the alps in a crowded Ryanair plane is probably one of the greatest things you can do. If there are gods, surely this is where they live. Or some of them, at least.
3. The little girls across the aisle are wearing matching rainbow zig zag dresses, and white leggings and white socks with frills around the ankles, and even their white sequinned shoes match. Their headphones are different colours, but the same brand.
4. When we pass over the alps I’m listening to my favourite mixtape and this really dancy electro tune kicks in just at the moment I’m going ‘wow’, not really believing I’m actually looking at the Alps from the air and wondering if that’s even the Alps because I’m terrible at geography. No one else really seems to notice, me craning my head looking around crazily around the cabin to check if anyone else is going ‘wow’ or just kind of glued to the windows with awe, synth and percussion pumping through my head. We’re floating over this stupendous bunch of mountains in clouds that look like super slow-motion photos of exploding icing sugar. They look simultaneously edible and terrifying.
5. The littlest girl in a zig zag dress and white sequins across the aisle decides to try and start changing her own nappy. She just stands up on the seat – she’s got a row to herself for some reason – takes her leggings off, and starts undoing the nappy, telling her Mum in the row in front it’s wet, her Mum replying ‘mm, ok, well -‘ without acting on it yet or even really looking. I thought nappies were too complicated for toddlers to operate, but now that I think about it, that seems ridiculous. It does seem strange though, that you can be capable enough to dress, undress and change your own nappy but you still go ahead and pee in your pants.
6. I somehow find a photo of my ex boyfriend with my dead budgie on my laptop while waiting for the connecting flight in Dublin. I think about how in a way everything that photo captured is now dead and I think about impermanence and I have to remind myself that even though he’s posing, pouting a fat kiss to the blue ball of fluff, that was the only time. I don’t think he liked my budgie. I guess not many people did. He kind of hated everyone back, except me. I loved him. We had an understanding. Still, he was mad when I moved out and left him to languish in a corner at my Mum’s house. I still feel bad that I didn’t bury that tiny feathered body that loved me for 10 years myself. That my sister had to be the one to make sure the dogs wouldn’t dig him up.
7. The sunset’s roaring, and I think it looks like someone’s simba’d a smear of blood all over the horizon’s forehead. I can’t decide if we’re flying under the sunset or in it.
8. In a hotel room in Sicily with all these tiny bottles of shampoo and mini soaps and shoe polish and disposable slippers thinking ‘thank god they provided a toothbrush too’ and ‘this is a big-ass empty bed’. The crusted blue on the shower is so vibrant, I know I must really be in the Mediterranean. The water probably has more minerals, is more virile, knows what it wants, running over my distended belly swollen with the cheesy pizza that I should have known better than to eat.

*

sarah

High above the world where the thunder brews
She looks down and sees the circling tigers sneering in the dark
And the soft pink-nosed rabbits huddled in the street lights
Slicking back their ears rubbing ash into their fur
Blinking away tears as the battle lights fill their eyes
Shuddering as the growling rumbles sickly in the night
She wraps the clouds around her and wills sleep to come
Spits out lightning to drown out the horrors in her head

*

izzy

broken computers are the saddest thing
all those qwerty keys reclining in dumpster limbo
begging for some fingers to run across them
and remember the words that used to spill
into these long obsolete micro-chips

*

sarah

Around my raised finger folds a small band of silver
The fridge door slams and I catch my own shudder
The night is a huntress and she roars at the doorway
A bear with a bow, pursuer and pursued
Fletching her arrows with half-cocked breaths
Tipping their ends with a crescendo of fear
This flesh is no refuge from the scourges of thought

*

izzy

the taxi driver reading stars from the gutter
Mariah Carey’s still looking good
she’s got a younger man, laughing eyes
and the perfect nose for kitty-litter liner

*

sarah

There’s a well inside me, a well, and it’s burst all its buckets and the women are wading in ankle-deep shoulder-deep to snatch the bouncing children who are floating off to Charon.
The dams are all bloating and the waterfalls are roaring and the rats in the sewers are learning to swim. I’m the girl with her finger in the wall of the dyke and I’m stroking the water as it slinks past my knuckles and whispers ‘There’s not a man among them who doesn’t deserve to drown’ and the water in my belly is crying for its mother and my veins are all bulging to be opened and freed and I’m crying and crying to get the water out faster, crying and sweating and drooling and pissing, and I think of my mother with her face a red O and I think of my sister with her knees caked with blood and I think of my cousins all seeping like sponges and I let go, I let go, I tear my finger right out and the waves come on down like a Price is Right winner, like a choir of angels, like a drunk benediction, and I breathe in the bubbles and I’m lighter than heaven and I’m dancing destruction a hundred feet under and I’ll teach them to do it, they’ll see it all coming, all roaring and foaming and blurting victorious and the last thing they’ll think of is little old me and the water they found in my eyes and my cunt and my lover, she sighs. I shake between her knees. She reaches down like a god and strokes my face, whispers ‘Thank you.’ Whispers ‘You flood me.’ Whispers ‘Now, sleep.’

*

izzy

I picked the perfect rose for you
and swallowed it whole
thorns catching in my voicebox

*

sarah

I’ve got a new crest for the USA:
It’s a man fellating a handgun, and it’s blowing out his skull
I’ve got a new motto for the world:
It’s ‘We are the disease’
I’ve got a new message for the universe:
It’s ‘We are crueler than anything alive’
It’s ‘We do not deserve forgiveness’
It’s ‘God help the children’
It’s ‘Trust no-one’
It’s ‘How could this happen’
It’s ‘Turn back now’
It’s ‘Crush us to nothing’
It’s ‘Don’t try again’
It’s ‘Turn around and don’t stop ever stop running’

*

izzy

sometimes I hope I only have sons.
it seems easier to teach someone how to be kind
than how not to break, how to repair the cracks

sometimes the feel of skin on skin is a sacrament
other times, it’s like sandpaper
it leaves you raw, stinging and burnt

sometimes I cry for no reason, at least
no reason that’s nameable, no defined bruise
just a general realisation that hatred is real
and it brought guns

*

sarah

Cleave open my thighs and see what’s rotting inside
Come find your own face in the pitchy dank places
Little diver, your lanterns will sputter and die
From this velvety darkness no man has returned

*

izzy

the clouds below are rolling off into a sky-high horizon
like they’re trying to be a tundra
why on earth would the clouds want to mimic the earth and ice?
I think
but then I think, maybe it’s not the sky mimicking the tundra
but the tundra trying to be like clouds, wanting to be full of light and air
lifted and secret and inaccessible from below
I want to go to the biggest glacier with you.
the man in front of me has the most beautiful salt and pepper hair
thick and wavy, with the whites spread evenly among the dark greys
he could be in an ad for salt and pepper hair
I would definitely buy it I think
it’s reminding me of the few grey hairs on your head
they are still spread out and surprising little shocks of silver
like that day when we kept giving each other electric shocks every time we touched
and couldn’t figure out why
I think it was me dragging my feet on the department store carpets
but I still like to think it was you, electric, wide-eyed and real and really there
doing something as mundane as sharing the escalator with me
in the same geographic location, in the same physical space
bursting with electrons or whatever and I wanted to touch you even then
I want to see every hair on your head turn white
the idea of growing old has never been appealing to me
trimming our hair and nails forever as our ears and noses outgrow our faces
and the rest of us slowly disintegrates
recently I have been finding reasons to grow old
it’s terrifying to have a reason to want this plane to stay aloft
begging the invisible strings holding it suspended not to snap

*

sarah

i.

Can’t you see how marvellous it is that you and I came to be here?
Have you no wonder left in those tired grey eyes?
Ours is a miraculous love, never to be repeated, not in a million years
The whole universe had to be created just so I could hold you

ii.

The day you died I felt a funny old thrill in my guts after I got off the phone
Thought ‘This is it! This is the first! I’ve imagined this for years!’
And then I stepped into the shower and burst into tears as swift as a punch
Stopped just as quickly, stood quietly in the low-pressure trickle of wet
And thought about how you’d never be warm again

*

izzy

I built you a house out of paper but
it melted in the rain and turned to pulp
a lumpy puddle, a mess of good intentions

we plunged our hands in, got real dirty
up to our elbows in mashed-up words
and shaped the slush into rock-hard bricks

*

sarah

Half a world away from the wailing and still I can hear it
In the voices of schoolgirls grown hushed in the street
And see it in the eyes reflected in a phone screen
On a dark street under the blind bright stars
And they are my eyes and they are your eyes and they are frightened
I feel it in the catch in the throat when the footsteps grow faster
The blood in the breath and the impulse to run
The turning, keys clutched between fingers, to find
A benign faced late dog-walker, strolling back home
What bad bone is it in us that starts all the hatred
Pricks the instincts to cruelty and turns the tongue into pitch
What section of atoms can we excise at birth
To return to Eden, before the madness got in

*