December 2011
1 post
Superman
“How was it?”
He twisted off the cap from the bottle and looked at the bottle. He took a little sip. He shrugged his huge meat shoulders. “I dunno.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” She piled her hair up on top of her head and was holding it there, observing him, moving her fingers around a little bit, feeling the knots tug at her scalp.
“What...
October 2011
1 post
Look At Me When I'm Talking To You
I was at this party. I don’t want to be melodramatic. But for real, I just suddenly realised that I was the most powerful woman in the world and that the future kneeled at my feet looking up at me waiting to be given permission to suck my dick.
May 2011
1 post
It's Not The Impact
“I’m falling.”
“And why are you falling?”
“I’m falling though I’m not. I’m standing, I’m sitting. The pain in my head travels quickly from the back to the front, it hits my forehead at a high speed. It ruptures and breaks there behind my eyes. This is how I know I am falling backwards.”
“Where are you falling from?”
...
April 2011
1 post
Eddie Works Two Jobs
At night he bartends. He comes home at 2.30am and lies next to Polly who wakes up just enough to move her weight over so that they are touching and then goes back to sleep. Eddie wonders whether she does this consciously or unconsciously, and whether it really matters since if she’s doing it unconsciously then that means that there is some deep part of herself that truly loves and needs him,...
March 2011
1 post
Everything That My Heart Can Be
It is a fluttering thing that is caught in a tree. It is an icy cloud in a sky. It is the blue that I was trying to articulate but couldn’t. I take the collar of your shirt between my fingers. This is an intimacy that frightens me. For the rest of the day let’s not look at each other.
January 2011
2 posts
The Cha-Cha
Sometimes I can’t believe my body, my bones. And so then I pray to a small God inside me that I call my heart,
and He dances.
A Little Lie Down Before Dinner
You say that if you could stop doing it you would have stopped doing it but I don’t know your sick your pleasure. Let’s start again. Do you remember hell it’s pointless if you won’t even try. Well I’m trying you say but I see and it doesn’t look like.
December 2010
2 posts
Holiday
I served black tea. My mother made a face. Is this what you do? She was asking me. She said, “It’s nice. A little bitter for me.”
I scoured the room for signs that we might not be living a normal and happy life. I wondered about Eddie’s smoking and whether it would set my father’s asthma off. I opened a window but my father waved me away.
Eddie looked funny. He sat...
Don't You Want To Be A Hero
Buy issue 2 of Nutshell Magazine now for someone you love, put a pencil note next to one of my stories saying that it reminded you of them, in the future when we are old this will be a nice thing that you once did for all three of us.
November 2010
3 posts
kfan asked: Do you have a plan.
Around About Midnight
Polly is telling a story about a fight she had some months ago. She says that the woman lunged at her. Some sort of misunderstanding. A taxi. The driver was uninterested, eating a sandwich his wife had made for him. Tuna.
Polly’s face had been pushed into the car door, splitting her lip and chipping her tooth.
“That bitch has me in pain six weeks later. My tongue won’t heal. I...
Fireworks
I screamed his name in my sleep and woke us both up. I talk in my sleep, often shout and scream and wake us both up, but it was the first time I’d said his name. In the morning he mentioned it miserably. “Malcolm,” he said, imitating me. I nodded.
He heard “Malcolm” but the truth is that if I hadn’t shouted so loudly and woken us both up, the statement would...
October 2010
2 posts
Or My Heart
William Tell tried to teach me to allow apples to soften and mould rather than to put them on people’s heads and shoot at them. That way less people would die, or be frightened. But I was worried about the spoilt apples. I had to put them on the other side of a glass door to make sure that I didn’t touch them. And even then it was difficult to see grey blooming soft fruit where once...
Letter to a Black Dog
Darling, your barking is driving me quite mad.
September 2010
2 posts
The Meter Running
He holds up his index finger and wiggles it.
“This is my wife. She goes to bed with me every night. You know what I mean.”
You nod, distractedly. “Can you turn the heating up? I mean. Jesus. Is it so unreasonable for me to not want to see my breath in the air in September?”
He slams his hands down repeatedly on the steering wheel and sobs. “My wife! She’s...
Sweetheart, Lying Down
In the middle of the room roves the wild eye of the lightbulb hurrying the moth to die and that dip that flicker that you thought could have just been your imagination, your eyes, it might have even been the serotonin leveling itself out in your brain,
I mean,
who can tell with the amount of shit you’re on,
man,
but it happened, you saw it, and it was the world realising just how...
August 2010
2 posts
Various Voices Saying Similar Things
I met a girl, we climbed through broken windows, we saw the dim blue light that heralded the start of a new day, we drank vodka until she said “I can’t see, I’m blind”, we promised each other things, I borrowed her shoes once and it didn’t change the way I danced in the way that I thought it would, but eventually we didn’t have anything left to say to one...
Poem Serving As An Admonishment To A Forgetful...
Nadja, an unqualified audience of one considered your slim blue glove and found in its fingers an endless and sorrowful series of questions to which you, by your absence, were unable to answer. Returning home, they began imagining their own hand, resting listlessly, as severed. The blood sitting coolly in its veins, like silk threads untangled and fraying.
July 2010
5 posts
Still Life With Brown Eggs and Figs
If only I had the money I’d be out of here so fast etc etc.
After A Lot of Thought
I tried instigating an unromantic non-date, where I could hold her hand and flirt a little without it feeling like I was making promises about where we would live when we were old and what our feet would look like in the bed in the morning from the perspective of a little Chinese girl that we would adopt and call Sue.
We ended up fucking in the stinking basement toilet of a Mexican themed bar, I...
What It Sounds Like Inside Her Head
With her birthday party in full swing beneath her, nobody notices Anna climbing the stairs to the very top of the house, where she shuts the door gently behind herself so as to muffle as much as possible the sound of shouting children and adults drinking excessively and faking niceties. She is in the midst of turning twelve, but has no interest in the games or the cake or the dressing-up box that...
Helen And The Chemist
Alone in the middle of the night, the chemist woke himself murmuring the name of his round-faced, softly spoken Chemistry tutor. He briefly imagined the ways in which his life may have been different had he not met her, Helen, whose pale and veined hands had ushered him into a world of science and order. Before this he had been a somewhat proliferate and enthusiastic poet. It was assumed that he...
“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute...”
– Roald Dahl (b. September 13, 1916) (via savingpaper) (via libraryland) (via austinimus) (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
June 2010
2 posts
67
I am standing naked all day, every day, thinking about the time leaking and seeping like sour milk or the way Doris Lessing writes about her menstrual blood, which I find strange and sad.
Today’s headline: ”I’m Sorry Darling, I Don’t Think We’re Going To Survive This”
You Work Out What To Say & Then You Say It
I went to a party hosted by a girl with a clock tattooed on her chest. She introduced me to a boy who incidentally I had known a few years ago but lost touch with, and who now was almost exclusively concerned with shamanism. His new girlfriend had lank hair and said something that I misinterpreted as a slight against my character, but the misunderstanding was quickly resolved and fortunately I...
May 2010
1 post
Love Poems
I wrote a poem / You said it was derivative / So I hit you with a chair / And made your nose bleed
*
You couldn’t decide what to order / So I suggested you had a vagina instead of a penis
*
I was extremely happy / But then you weren’t as enthusiastic as I would have liked you to have been / So instead of going for ice cream we broke up
April 2010
3 posts
Some Blissful Things
A ribcage in umber pastels. Siegfried Idyll. The smell of pine trees warmed by the sun. Standing blistered and calm by the river. Pretending that these things belong to me, and that I have done something to deserve them.
A Red-Haired Girl Spends The Evening In The House...
He tells a story about Italy in 1993 and she thinks about how in 1993 she was learning how to do joined-up handwriting.
Incidentally, there was a strange moment when they were having sex where she said “You’re hurting me,” and he said “Darling, darling, darling.”
Bluebird
I saw Bukowski’s bluebird in my garden this afternoon. I smoked a cigarette in the drizzle and he pecked warily at half a coconut shell filled with fat. Something I did startled him, and he flew away: back to Bukowski’s heart, which is lean now, and hard to make a bed in.
March 2010
1 post
I Invent A New Type of Crepe
I’m writing stories for a magazine. One of them is called The Incredibly Sad Story of How I Was More Beautiful Than The Waitress. Three of them are about me anthropomorphising concepts such as the future and my own virginity and then saying that these concepts ‘scampered through the woods’ or had malicious ideas. I think I’ll round it off with one story that isn’t...
February 2010
2 posts
Five Oxford Commas
In front of you there is a picture of a boy and a fox. You must choose between the boy and the fox. Choose carefully, because although the boy will grow up to be a pianist with the face of Cupid, the fox might be symbolic. The fox might represent many important things.
Are you sure?
Well, alright. And now the fox will be killed, and a coat will be made of its fur, and you must wear this coat...
14B Tower Workshops
My skin against hers is mottled with stretchmarks. My skin looks almost purple in this light. She gleams like she has been freed from stone. This light is for her. The black is for her white. I leap into the air as she does. In the photograph I look like her shadow.
Later, looking at the images with him, he claps with delight at an injury that looks like a cigarette burn on my hip, and a scar on...
January 2010
5 posts
"I thought it would be better to burn"
At the age of eleven, she set herself on fire on what would have been her wedding day.
I Ask Myself The Same Thing
Q: Are you afraid of the dark?
A: No, but I am afraid of falling down the stairs in the dark.
Q: Is it true that you have a crush on pop philosopher Alain de Botton?
A: I want to take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who has ever heard me profess a liking for Alain de Botton. I realise now that this was wrong, and that he is creepy.
Q: When is a good time to remove a nipple piercing?
...
Ask Me Anything
He says, “Ask me anything.”
You consider this.
“Will I ever get what I want?”
“No.” He replies.
That night you try and do your best to have a good time at the party, and most people don’t notice that anything’s different, but the truth is evident to you when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, and your hair doesn’t look very...
You In Yellow
I imagine we are standing next to each other, in a line, with many others; all of us in brightly coloured dresses. We are standing with our backs against the wall. There is a great expanse of water in front of us. The wind tortures the fabric of our clothes. We look like dancers but we cannot move an inch for fear of falling. We are afraid. The sun shines brightly. How beautiful we look.
Poem:
I think of my body as a tree trying to shake a cat from its branches
December 2009
4 posts
An Exciting Thing That I've Never Told You I Do
Please don’t phone me at midnight. I don’t want to say “Happy New Year”, or to hear it. Of course it will be happy; every moment that passes is an unbearable blessing of which I am supremely grateful although ultimately exhausted by and anyway at midnight I turn into a little bat and fly out of my window and so I won’t be able to answer my phone.
It Was The Apocalypse Or Something
I dreamt that lightning was hitting everything and that planes were falling out of the sky and that cars flew from the road and smashed into buildings and burst into flames. My dad started to cry and I just didn’t know what to think, I was scared too, all these people were dying and everyone was afraid or they were burning or falling but I was embarrassed, I wished he would just stop...
In Which We Meet Harry
“It isn’t a leak,” He says, “It’s condensation.” He is reluctant to bend down to touch it, I can tell. I bend down and demonstrate how to touch it.
“But it’s all mouldy,” I say. I think I might sound like I’m whining. I put my hand out to show him. “And it’s cold and wet.” You can’t see that my hand is cold. I...
Thanks For Coming, Anyway
I love so many people so much, but they can’t give me what I want because what I want is a secret and I’m not supposed to tell anybody.
November 2009
4 posts
Round Black Ghosts
Everything was silver, everything was cold. I fell asleep when the wind eventually dropped and dreamed of a man in New Orleans smoking cigarettes that he kept inside pigs’ heads. I ate my cereal with water because the milk was sour.
(In real life, not in the dream.)
Corso
Bad days of drunk / Make bad days of sorry / Last night was stained with fear / I or the world was all wrong
Artyom Sidorkin
A storm lashing against the badly-fitting windows wakes me up. But then I cough, so maybe I was about to wake to cough anyway. During the night the curtain rail has fallen down, yes, I remember that, I woke up when that happened.
I can see the night lit up via various sources: this person has left their (kitchen?) light on, the glow from street lamps, cars’ headlights, the moon of course,...
Is This A Good Day
I resist the urge to be belligerent and resent the sing-songy quality of his voice, the way he uses my name a lot, the way he says ‘Okay’ like that, I admit that I imagine him pushing his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose but it isn’t that I sneer at his compassionate dismissal of my apologies, or, though I assume myself to be able to guess at his beverage choices, that I...
October 2009
1 post
Malamud
Q. Why don’t you keep a journal?
A. I’m afraid of what it might say.