…eyes on my skin, small hellos and howeyas in smoking areas and bathroom queues / imagined passengers in passing cars feel like scalpel incisions – the flaying of a beast. I crumple into nothing under floodlights of sight.

start with a bruised body and the wrong knife, take a hound’s eye: follow the pierce and spatter, little globules seething as red thumbs dig to outrun the decay.

After all, who wouldn’t rather fractions over fractures?

Written after the death of Mahsa Amini  Some days, some part of me refuses to put pain down on paper. These are the days I pull away, stretch myself...

Sharp the placenames of reliquary Bitter the taste of the buried I stand hunched by the Lake of Saints Disinter my brutal brutalized heartVouchsafe...