D A U
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R T E H H O O D Z
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issue three
photography - Viki Babczyk model - Julia Szwed
onten c / / ts e m o c l e w for issue three we are wearing cathedrals, wielding diamond swords. expect soufflé pearls & splendour domes, startled shimmers & suspect rivers. we will wade through seas of crying milk to reach the apocalyptic pleasure levels of a lavender balloon. invent economies of the supposed, gilded, become just a ribbon, floating. kinship as interface / becoming / alien abduction / shambolic / biohazardous / a glissando / interrupted by wolves. featuring: Sabeen Chaudhry Ali Graham Lena Walker Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir Marina Scott Thom River Ellen MacAskill Bluey Little Anna Walsh Meredith Grace Thompson Reem Saoud Sultan Stella Green Blades Maxima Thomas Ciara Maguire Hannah Machover Viki Babczyk
Sabeen Chaudhry Real Names I wanna flick my tail into honeysuckle without thinking about the death that’s coming for you. After you die, I walk old ends still trying to find a hot take on why my mouth looks so sad. In past lives I’ve been in the houses of your childhood, in a photo in which I’m not supposed to be, blue salwar white balloon. Impossibility is filial but this isn’t that – I knew you before this birth, ‘father’| ‘daughter’ interface an entropy w/o time or real names, I say to my imaginary kid ‘your mother died before you were born,’ and no longer think of the old lady’s tights drying, as aliens I can see only by climbing to look over the fence at playtime. Everyone’s triggered by me.
Indifferent Tidal Dragging I underworld myalgic iridescence a cislunar connivance this dance. I find the energy, tides, blow kisses hidden nacre not to say it all aloud. I trade memories with the missive sky see, it’s not all bad is it? We only fight in lace cuffs expired choreographies we welter in seas of crying milk can never leave each other now.
Hannah Machover
Ali Graham Supermarket tasselled Slickly I grip my knee in an unlit room and invent you full body stiffening. There is what was before it could be thought. There is this I am giving to my self. There is no abstraction to it, either I am saying you and you are resting to the music or I have not once in my life sung. I felt falsely the vertigo I get when I am about to be known move like a cellular network in that dusk.
Body in the shade song I mother each road movie replete with sodomising. Our visions of the future so snowily particular to this steamy engine. Flickering places I owe you this I scorch much I keep from I stultify the big window I cannot photograph Wearing the furs what I have all I have on my body hysterical in the long mirror twangy animal musk Wearing the fur like I’m waiting for water and oil I’ll get this self free I’ll take down images of transparent surfaces I said, fully,
your pleasure is metallic catches sun some tuber pulled up edible I put the soily mushrooms in the oven the fibrous dark up against silver
I will consider the cloth savvy of the ground mattering to occasions in which the baked dirt on my gums That steamy engine has to go through somebody’s heart. That knot in the music, suggestive of asphyxiation. That musk as a guitar twanging or a guitar twanging as that mood of musk. That jewel-shaped bit of night where I am turning this over. That readiness for avalanche of maximal both us clasped in differing airs of inadmissible growth flowered sickly with it Though what broke in the plaza goes unheard. Though the mornings’ controlled adventuring. Though this wispy predilection. Though the yellow taste I designate to the state, awake and star-crossed. Crying therapists An orrery of them churn the ocean with their toes I’m somersaulting in my mentalising Each synapse bridled to an individual horse At least seventy-one – no? I was handed apocalyptic pleasure levels like I like some pixelling almost of the day bunched-up fabricated the fabric “we” have woven apparently to scream for and subject to cost-benefit analysis I put it through delays of orange of purple then assembled
some would say invented blue of a spider’s web on this burning earth in some early morning I don’t describe I take off my hair
I find my enemies out on a street neither full nor empty beyond singing I lick lap it up as how I was on my knees in a static charge, in a luxury of cities in the morning. Salt on the rim of the glass being some kind of conduit. A great deal of language moving along the rim was translucent. My enemies were there in visitation. As was I, to show the interstellar of what I had practiced for them. I had a practice, for them. I wake with my head spinning me into the world. I notice the properties of a large mint leaf roosting on my tongue. I will let nothing out from narrowness. I will let out nothing not sufficing. I will out: thermocline, let nothing be abstract. I will choreographically see nothing let out. I spikily position nothing will let out. As it happens letting out. In the photo of the graveyard shambolic with green, the robin on the headstone does not mean loss only. Nor the knit of some rich night to a window, quick indigo, though I grieve the years revised by a windy place beyond longing, somatically. After all it there is what? My age; the break of the
sea, of stone chips from a larger body. The economies of supposedness, each more brutal than the last. I know them up amongst in the castellations. \\ Flecked with birch sap and rampant with lack amongst the gold acoustics, I’ve come to live and it’s a big nonetheless, but there are certain allowances for my or any face so mammalian in the rain.
Lena Walker What is this ancient, terracotta longing? My mother loves the diehard films, cherry grenadine. I have her shoulders, mild fanaticism. Terrible at waking up, always hiding hand mirrors in fields, so to speak, then searching for said mirrors. I want to visit the Odessa Meteor Crater in Ector County, West Texas, and sulk. In love, I am not myself. In fact, entirely beyond. Not a lecherous want, but anatomical—desire to trace & annotate the lover’s spine, like what the trees dispatch after a storm, how the whole forest hums. I have a greed I can’t forestall, enjoy eating plums in quick succession. Still, I’ve come close. I had not wanted to be alone.
In the Gilded Marginalia of a 15th Century Manuscript A woman rests. Her body swept in gold. Asleep in the Orchard of forget-me-nots. Heavy with:
wander.
When I look at my life I think
I can’t possibly put it all to use. Empty bottle, red pen, vitamin pills.
I wore a cathedral to the gala & woke blessedly in a pair of iris murdoch’s panties 100 percent shoeless chewing gum flavored gum, cheersed my cup of glossolalia to the sun. It’s something I always aspire to— correspondence in poetry, locating real feelings in fantasies while eating a grapefruit. “I don’t want there to be clarity” says C (re: her poem) whisked and BRIGHT like an omelet. Her eyes like pileas set aloft in Holderlin’s tower. In whose hands is day’s length, etc., holding my hand. There being no question in my mind this is the rest of the way— anything sort of soft, green.
I miss you with great finesse, not unlike a chisel set. In the meantime I imagine each particle gently thinking. Which one is more uppity—spondee or dactyl?
Were I more attuned to Eros I might not keep the television playing for its cool blue light, I might find the twenty-four hour Rite Aid less seductive in its discount offerings, I might be a virtuoso of cumming, but I have an unspecific lust. In some ways my mouth is an unspecific elegy for my dead grandmother who enjoyed fine silver cutlery and paradise fruit cake. In some visions before sleep— angels fantastic and leering, licking oil off the wings of waterfowl w/their biohazard red lips.
Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir Wait for the sediment to settle in my mother’s cup I serve everyone fruit from this cup. Then coffee and after, lift the cup above your head, three circles clock-wise and then against, gathering your thoughts, blow a cross inside it against the bad stuff, place it securely on the nearest radiator. Lean it on a little plate. Then you can see what awaits after this melon, grains align, I read future from the lip: a hand with four fingers, awkward incident, a number, seven with five zeroes or a seven and dark dots that bring sorrow; that if anything reminds you of a foetus it probably is. Along the body: the porcelain has pushed you soft lines: long mail or! surprise! It’s a long boat with coal or sugar cubes in the foot you have circled me a past, the letter L, you recognise it, a pigeon with a single grape and a pair of dried feet in 39, prints, nothing you don’t know it lasts for a month, each cup’s telling, the blue gulls on the outside and if it wasn’t for standardised room sizes the length of my arm I could serve everyone fruit from this cup and no suffer.
Marina Scott DESIRE PATHS one hot, slow morning one cold month ago, I was brewing coffee, trying to push the filter down against stubborn grounds. their stubborn gaze held my frame in the garden, chimera eyes shifting with the light, the green of the trees, the echo of a note. to be seen is a queer satisfaction like how the moment before a glass falls you can already see it shatter, like finding evidence that you know points to some perpetually unknowable wonder, a line made by walking through grass, and all of this I guess is just to say that the way they look at me feels different
Thom diamond sword sorry today cried in the shower was sad. yesterday slapped a beard on my face and marched down albion rd., weeping. the sky pink and black. doctor he/him can’t pretend he’s not a dyke anymore. doctor he/him wears briefs. doctor he/him’s grandfather is dead so at least that relationship isn’t irrevocably fucked. but i mean my mother was a woman and so it’s only right i be one too. and anyway i’m a sucker for narrowing my horizons. anyway i’m a savage for queer + cat content according to my For You Page. i’m after a big abode and a large booty. boiling water taps and a back that claps back, u get me. and i’m crazy maybe lunatic. but i’m sorry today. unusual universe movements brought me here to u. and i’m bad. bad as in i’m bad bad as in i’m a bad bitch bad as in the etymological
root of the word, old english baeddel: womanish, of a man. u get me: the it after he/she, the f in french IGCSE. and u don’t suspect it beautiful people but i am going to be speaking out of a mouth like urs one day. i am slowly learning key concepts related to the art of deepfaking. these include learned keypoints, motion extraction, disentangling appearance and motion, and occlusion maps. yes i did compare myself to a deepfaker. yes i do compare thee to a summer’s day. but do excuse me. when u bore of me i’ll go wait in the anteroom. though let me say first that when i left ur flat i thought to myself boiii sorry gurl u’ve come a long way since smashing research chemicals in the Ask Italian with ur gremlins (nothing against my gremlins, just a lot against Ask Italian). but for serious. my apologies. hope you don’t mind but when i left ur flat after i said i might be a girl i thought god. u a bad bitch. u my strength-and-stay. with who else could i touch the alien abduction plastic and become just a ribbon, floating?
since we’re all hydroelectric body beings spinning a bit fast why don’t i be hydroelectric and a girl? so we did it. an end/beginning. i won’t forget. the duration of This Cruel Summer Part 2 u and i found new ways to coffin-dodge. we disentangled the earphone cable. so call me if u need. please. but for now let’s pretend. let’s drink the Apple Tango of our Big
Fat Gay Asexual Legally Blonde Hot Girl Summer. future what future. this is a plague-safe rave, there are no afters.
hill & thigh territory pastoral 1. hinterland, can i be alone in this stream a lone thing inside the water, cleaving it? 2. breast stroke, front stroke poor form butterfly stroke with my head heaving spray and sparkles nobody sees but which land and moisten some leaves 3. i spent to-day discovering new errors at margin inside the river (inside me) (on me) 4. buoying up near heart cavity two-set gravity thickening water around
off the surface
5. this is called budding i.e. biological metaphor applied to biology i.e. these breasts furred new (near my body)
6. breast stroke plus back stroke and front stroke moving moving forward this girlhood this hardy wildflower 7. i have to ask (going forward) what kind of nonplatonic ideal remains of me for you to touch yourself to angel-dove 8. this landscape flirts with me but in what way? a knowing look nothing at all eardrums ache and cold
9. upper reaches, is it possible for me to be alone in this brook-cum river 10. this shaded vertex from which you will depart non-stop twizzling coin-glitter blue
into other canyons?
11. will you grow shoddy with cement? and what about the dust from bridges? will there be houses there people, too? 12. just this morning I absolved myself of the guilt of dreaming yet another pastoral, love 13. i wasn’t alone this time. there were a hundred of us. mosiers-about
in this upcountry
the river pulls water from 14. it was ample and there were comestibles oxbows pools for paddle okayness in profusion 15. darlings, when we slept in the farmer’s bothey no one ever came and we cooked fusilli on the camp stove
we were there
16. at pre-dawn the last embers died and there we were the trickle of a rivulet furrowing a new groove 17. so: from this curve under the trees the tributary will go adjoin wide & far estuaries rias dragging silt downcountry
to gulch and mere til bottom land 18. there will be cities along the way and people too, and these people will be people whom I think I must go and say hello to. 19. but then, chicken, I remind you that up here, and for now it is possible to be alone 20. i can get into the water of this wide and cool stream lonesome and big this water before it comes to be that something else it will have to be so soon
River Ellen MacAskill Five Year Plan there’s this future where I can say what I want about myself to anyone at any time jaw sharp and hair thick chest painless flat and full in lovers’ mouths I plant stuff and run a salon everyone is bisexual dedicate my hands to others bright windows high ceilings sacred glassy bubble my mum in her age will just love her strapping son and I’ll spend hardly any time online. there’s this future where I’m crawling out of my fleshy case, dead and pinking and competent no bosses, no waitlists, no sexless stares
I will never be mortified again
Bluey Little Soufflé Pearl About to be Sawn in Half a cuckoo born from the filth beneath your nails, I was gusted into the womb by hypodermic needle the goal was to scour me out but here I gleam, muddied and wrong, child to a mother with a hole in her head I am stewing in puce meant for finer kin: ripple, fireball, Ming I soak in leftover spittle and nurse my lumpen bloat on lustre so thick it sings a glissando praying for the ridiculous, to shroud an ever waning centre from the graze of your hacksaw hush that tread, my shimmer startles easily
Anna Walsh COME TO T WEL HE SPLEN
UR O D
ME O D
I have walked in on my own life breaking, so slowly that breaking became the essence of its function. I have been afraid of breaking for so long that now I am more worried about dying afraid than dying at all, and I am walking out of this life of terror this place where I know nothing but shadows, cool and familiar and too close In my life of terror I could not touch a thing for fear it would break, or dissipate I am moving on now, I am saying no, I am going to a different planet and I am bringing you with me if you want, I am going away to the Splendour Dome,
a giant pink spinning planet, a sparkling maximalist clam covered in soft velvety textures and clotted with rhinestones that taste like sweets, yes I can eat them, yes I put them in my mouth because I will die before I left fear refuse me things in my own mouth, my mouth is open like an o, like a pearl, and you can laugh at me when I tell you about the Splendour Dome, that is okay because if we lose the ability to laugh at one another we concede more ground than we can know, because I need you to laugh at me so
I know we are both still vulnerable, so I know we can laugh as well as cry, argue as we fly upwards to the pink dome where the stones taste chalky and the pink ground beneath us carries the heat of the sun, and we can breathe here we can breathe easy, and even if something happens and my skin turns ragged and suddenly hard, like the skin of a crocodile because I have disgusted myself in the past, and I find myself disgusted again, terrified of still hating myself because how can anyone stand that, hating themselves, I who am innocent like a child, like a child who is either unloved or loved badly and feels deep perversions in their bones, but it is untrue, no child is born bad, it is a lie of force a lie of control and it has been issued for the sins of the state to keep me complicit, to keep me hating my body, my body I am forced to live in, and I need you to laugh and say
cop yourself on I like you and we are going to eat some eggs and bread and I will help you wrestle your shame to the ground I lie back in the clam and tumble forward in space, weightless now in the Splendour Dome’s big pink generosity of softness and touch, and you will laugh at me and say, wow this is so weird, is this anything, and my heart will wobble in your hands, my throat will open like an o as I want to cry because I am so happy we have made it to the Splendour Dome, this place where we get our medication refilled immediately and where heat is free and where we feel safe and do not doubt it or expect it to end
and I am up up away living with speed now, flying beyond my earthly possibilities but loving my legs for carrying me, for bringing me as far as they could, loving my loves for bringing me here, feeling the shake of what comes next as I speak, trembling before the giant gold wings and flame of the sun and the next life, the next life I am so afraid of I could die but will meet one day I think of the first time I broke down in front of you, I cried in bed for the whole night and as you held me I hurtled through grief everything bad that had ever happened stayed with me that night and I gave up trying to outrun it and you held me down until everything stopped moving and I said goodbye to that heavy load. I have walked out of my broken life and my worries are falling out of my pockets like bus tickets, like chewing gum, and nobody could have predicted this, this that happens only once every five thousand years, only once every second, only across time and space in the most immaterial bright living ways, only here and now could I feel this exact love for you, for you and me in the Splendour Dome, I love you, and I will always love you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me, because we live here and walk tall and think pink and I loved you before either of us were born into such violent states, and even if someone hurts me or you to the point that we feel broken again it won’t touch this, because being broken is not death, no matter how much I sometimes wanted it to be, and when
we both expand and contract and pop into nothingness there’s no telling how much of us will be stars and small pieces of floating rock or maybe not, maybe not and maybe even that is okay because it has to be okay, because I cannot change it or control it and anyways, we will burn too bright for anyone to care what happens afterwards, we will light up here in the clam, in the pink Splendour Dome clam with the satin covers and soft glowing iridescence like a deep-sea creature that has been crushed into living a specific way that seems alien, and when something is so far away perhaps it is alien perhaps it is terrifying, something that is shaped so differently so explicitly attuned to a different pressure, and I don’t have to love anything I don’t want to but it glows in front of me and I think of hatchetfish, blobfish, whales and sea cucumbers and I wish I was
a pregnant seahorse moving in shallow water looking like an ornament but full, full of messy excretions and life and doing things so I can keep going because it is always going to be important to me to keep going no matter what, and I will not apologise for wanting life wanting life more than nothingness I have walked out of a broken life and into another into something shattered, made of small pieces, my eyes cannot always adjust to the light or the pressure here, but I can open them every day, and close them before I sleep, and I believe we could do this every single day, until the sun moves into its last light and I am still not ready to go, but will, too, be swallowed up by the light
Meredith Grace Thompson why do i hesitate to cut my fingernails they are ugly and dirty and short too short to be beautiful too long to be useful they prevent me from doing so many things playing violin or guitar all string instruments really what if a chasm of cellos opened up below me? am i supposed to just ignore it? there is nothing keeping them here protruding from my fingertips no reasons no logic nothing at all except my mother has long beautiful nails and part of me small or perhaps larger than i knew will always want to be like her
i feel shame emanating from the pits of my many stomachs and the edges of my shattered elbows that i should be here again tears in my eyes and a red tipped nose my eyes won’t focus if you ever want to not make any money then become a poet my father said without thinking one fateful october afternoon do you think leonard cohen would ever have picked up a guitar if poets made any money? my musicology professor said one fateful november morning what do you write? a literary agent seated next to me at a party asked one fateful april evening poetry i said he laughed do you ever want to make any money? not particularly i smiled and i meant it at the time but then rent food bartend to make money hate bartending serve to make money hate serving need money money to live live to make poetry sometimes i wonder poetry for money money for poetry can art ever truly be free of commodification? how many pennies would you give me for this?
and intellectual freedom depends on material things
poetry requires intellectual freedom
Reem Saoud Sultan Sestina The fat firstlings of the sun’s beams caught the devil crouching in the blue fields waiting for a brother on the run. Come morning, we were there to see the shepherd’s blood mellow into a cave of yellow treasures well lit by itself and the dying day’s heat. We were burned again in the brawling heat where an apple-wooden beam cut across orange soil and the wellfled man from Canaan wrestled a bundle of blue and gold feathers. He rested with us under the mellow trunk of a chandelier before taking to the run again. We did not run (who was there left to tell?) but called wordlessly in the heat for the men’s fists to one day mellow into prayer- in those prayers we saw beams of gypsum, pearl and soda blue shine icy columns and milky wells onto the blazing fields. Well, we prayed haggardly on as the deathless months let life run its unbroken course, while the winds blew the scattered pieces of Osiris across the wailing heat for his sisters to put back together. A sunbeam
flooded their faces for one mellow moment, when the youngest among us spotted the mellowed etches we all wore under our eyes. Well, we watched on with our punished eyes as babies on beams were sent downstream by their punished mothers. Kunti ran her gaze along the river before us, and from the sky’s heat we wove for her a basket of flaming blues. We must have spent years in our white caps and blue ideas before the caves finally drew us into their mellow arms. Scorched by the burning fields, we pressed our hot faces into the crisp and silky wells of pearl and gypsum, while heaven ran down from the ceiling in beams. Our naked bodies turned a sweet blue in that diamond well Mellow at last without the shuddering gazes of men on the run Join us now, loose from the heat, our abbey of milk and moonbeam
Stella Green dogs on the keyboard God’s eyelid is thin With the rapture of creating And my fingers are dogs on the keyboard hoping To be caught For the feeling of forgiveness afterwards For the feeling of you stroking my hair Forgive me and my blood turns tall Like an attic Overground freight trains in the night like Ghost horses whinnying like Something of you Coursing through me Because of course night is when you visit me Because you are so much closer when there is nothing else to see And Lilith fucked the archangel So her body became half bird and her pussy Ice And she birthed legions of Lilin Children of the inhospitable womb Who became known in dreams And that is where you visit me And that is where I visit you In second sight We reach in the darkness
In second sight The daylight is torn away and For a moment Everything suspended in the corner of your Mouth I have spent years Just close enough To kiss your cheek I imagine it impossible soft I imagine it like grandma’s was I imagine there is salvation in your skin (But perhaps that is because it is unhaveable) That which is half-known is more godly than truth and I have Always Half-known you Men die repentant out of fear for the badness they have done But I will die repentant for my goodness All for you who never saw it You with no eyes And my fingers are dogs on the keyboard Hoping they will run fast enough To catch up with you
Blades Birthday Mother, may I? A simple stream of thought Is crossed. A mind map, stitched An illicit exchange Is all that this is. A tacit ghost met me empty handed At the grocery store. The world seemed bigger then The dream reflected itself Entangled with gridded branches, broken physics Perfect English I was in it, it was present. Every moment ever lasting Every fear, each moment passing Mother dear, I think I’ve failed you. I only meant to appease you You know I solely live to please you It is all I’ve been taught. I fulfilled my purpose, did I not? Feed me pitted olives, depleted salt lakes Jarred peppers and yellow sponge cake Shaped like a treasure trunk Sprinkled with candied plastic.
(It’s me that asked it: My poem is silent My poem is painting My poem came in empty handed Shut the door, wailing Curled up at the foot of the bed And waited.) Now It’s pits of vinegar that dry up the eye Garlic that smothers the gaps in my child soul I stomach chips, stuffing a void that cannot be filled. I feel a hunger that cannot be fed An inexorable appetite for emptiness The mirror chokes on its own disdain Nothing I can do or say. There is no truth here; I see that much. Now It is Foil crumpled into the shape of a child’s skeleton. In liminal inquiry, One rarely relinquishes resemblance. My eye is nothing but an eye making machine When I look through you I look through me I cannot put this any more clearly: I am you.
Maxima Thomas Original Sin I did not consent to birth existence or embodied cognition I wish to diffuse through an aether of ideas and intentions defined only by the boundaries of my beliefs and interactions let me propagate across the multiverse effervescent in my ecstasy to become totality and nothingness anything but this compression of my infinitude into three dimensions of flesh and blood cliffs and mountains, lakes and oceans are not burdened by the unfairness inherent in their inability to self observe the greatest versions of ourselves live in the eyes of the external inaccessible a curse indeed on my proprioception reflections and lies, subjectively objective
WHEEEEEEOOOOP WHEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOP my poem is interrupted by a wolf staring with sick smiles and slobber at my curvaceous legs, soaking up sunshine a defiant tower rises from the borderlands of my palm YOU CAN SUCK ON THAT FINGER YOU BITCH
TRANS IS? TRANS IS REAL when i was 20 i died suffocating on bliss, sadness & heroin but by some miracle i woke up in a world i had always wanted to visit (( and maybe stay forever )) TRANS IS FAKE i had a dream where i picked up a bag of beads 8 billion shiny beads and i knew i must be dreaming because all of the beads were the same
TRANS IS VULNERABLE locked in a cage we scream to be let free the only answer is mocking and stones being thrown until one hits a bystander and then a sign appears: NO THROWING STONES AT THE FREAKS TRANS IS EXPERIMENTAL now, im not a bigot! i think eeeeveryone should live how they want its just that im concerned about womens sports what? no, no i dont watch any and teenagers dont know who they are wont someone think of the children!! oh and did i mention i would NEVER EVER FUCK A TRAN TRANS IS TRICKERY shes so fit man oh mate i know what do you reckon? are you saying you wouldnt? crazy how they would probably beat me bloody and bruised if they only knew that i am
not the fucktoy they had in mind TRANS IS BEAUTIFUL (( but only when we dont look it )) omg ur so pretty !!!!!! <33333 its funny how i only got those comments after i started passing TRANS IS BROKEN nails dig into flesh blood sighs in the scratches i dont hear peoples compliments get this face off of me trying to find my value peering over the toilet seat all i really see is my life spilling out of my stomach TRANS IS FIXABLE im sorry that my understanding of my body and its intricacies goes so far beyond what you have ever seen navel gazing your genitals are just words but mine are transcendental
TRANS IS.
Ciara Maguire MOMMY ISSUES breath like sour milk tender, pink maternal hand holding peach glass blood on chiffon your mouth like a baby bird open, soft collecting spit welcome breast a powder dream membrane full and gently swelling what cannot be contained by a body? purple blooming under flesh, coagulating womb soft sucking motion warm stain that gathers in the back of your throat when you ask for
communion
i give it
when you whisper mommy i answer
I WAS A LESBIAN CHILD I was born with a dyke heart held between my ribs; an innate knowledge of how to hold power tools as I grow I learn the language a way of looking; a way of needing to be seen I fall in love with strong arms and crooked teeth with girls with sour tongues and salt between their breasts they write me letters and I keep them every new love feels like making history
I am always looking for women like me I think I could find us anywhere my hands run over binders and skin like symmetry, like veins kneeling before them like altars, stone butch hands that press plastic to metal to skin we hold each other in club bathrooms and dark bedrooms anywhere that will have us could you imagine being this free? my mother says dyke is such an ugly word but it feels so good in my mouth I watch women carry lavender balloons around the city, into schools
to say; there is another way of being there is hope for you baby, you can be a lesbian too
C
TRIBUTORS N O
A
B OUT T H E
Viki Babczyk is an analogue photographer, creative director and stylist based in Edinburgh. Aside from her pursuits in editorial and fashion visuals, a lot of her personal work revolves around exploring ancestral trauma and carrying the weight that comes with coming from a family where generational trauma, particularly in regard to spirituality, is passed down through the generations. ig @filmbyviki. Blades is a third-year Philosophy student from Portugal. She is a Cancer sun and Aries rising, so you can often find her tormented by the most inconsequential decisions. In her spare time, she enjoys making music with friends and eating Artisan Greek Pastries while watching the same three TV shows on repeat (for comfort purposes). Sabeen Chaudhry writes poetry, theory and fiction. She is currently completing a PhD at Kingston University, researching love and media technologies. She also does research and programming for DEMO Moving Image and co-edits Deleuzine. ig @sabeen.chaudhry. River Ellen MacAskill (b. 1994) is a writer and massage therapist from the north of Scotland based in Glasgow, UK. Their lesbian road trip novel Coasting and their long poem Virility at Home were released in Spring 2021. Follow their work on Instagram, @__leomoon. Ali Graham lives and works in Norwich. Their poems have been published by The Tangerine, Datableed, and Permeable Barrier, and their essays have been published by Futch Press Journal and Spam. Their pamphlet Wreathing is forthcoming from Spam, and you can find them on Instagram as @aligrhm. Stella Green is a jew with attachment issues who writes and finds it uncomfortable to talk about herself in the third person. Shortlisted for the women’s prize for playwriting, it has all been downhill since then. Message her, commission her, she wants to share her writing more and meet other writers. Twitter: @Stella__GreenIG: @stellagreenstellargroin
Bluey Little (she/they) is a hot mess of air signs. She is also a queer poet and theatremaker from Glasgow by way of Leeds. You can find more at blueylittle.co.uk or on ig @blueylit. Hannah Machover is a writer-printmaker. Her work is (an) notational, with specific figures and objects recurring across mediums; spectral, anchoring. Her drawings, writings and prints are full of the traces of editing, spilling out of their given frames, often rooted in oral tales and anecdotes. ig @hmachover Ciara Maguire is a writer living in Glasgow. She has previously been published in We Were Always Here: A Queer Words Anothology and From Glasgow To Saturn. She is currently studying the Creative Writing MLitt at the University of Glasgow. She is interested in ideas of transformation, loneliness and queer expansiveness. Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir is an Icelandic poetry and prose writer. She recently graduated from Goldsmiths with a BA in Creative Writing and English. Her work has been published in amberflora zine, Wormhole Newspaper, Raum 106 publication, GoldDust Magazine, the Leopard, Skandali and Pastel Series. Marina Scott is a writer who grew up in Cornwall by the sea. They are currently based in South East London where they work remotely for a literary festival. They hold a degree in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and have published work with Antithesis Journal, SPAM Zine, Polyester Zine, & Sticky Fingers Publishing. They can be found on Instagram @marina_scott and via Twitter @marinaasinsea. Reem Saoud Sultan is an international pop sensation. She writes poetry, likes to make collages and is in her final year of a history degree at the university of oxford. Maxima Thomas ((she/her)) is a |REDACTED| currently living in Exeter, Devon. Having graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in linguistics, she currently juggles trying to be a model, photographer, artist, musician, and philosopher, but mostly ends up being a hopeless stoner. ig @ maxima.busby & enjoylifetothis Thom is an Anglo-Brazilian writer and translator living between London, Oxford, and a handful of other places. They are also the co-editor of RGB Colour Scheme lit zine. insta: @seemsvague
Meredith Grace Thompson (she/they) is a Canadian white settler poet and essayist originally from Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, AB). She completed a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and English literature from Concordia University, Montréal in 2014 and a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Glasgow in 2019. Longlisted for the Vallum 2020 Award for poetry, their work can be found in SPAM zine&press, GNU Journal, The Dallas Review, -algia and more. In 2020 their essay “ON: procrastination” was translated by Chilean press Queltehue Ediciones. She is editorof BlueHouse Journal, co-editor of orangeapplepress, and a contributing reviewer for Cloud Lake Literary. Lena Walker is an arts educator, and a training art therapist. She is the founder of the Children’s Poetry Library, a traveling library for people who are (or were once) kids. Her work has been featured in Solar Journal, SIZL Zine, Kitchen Sink Zine, the tiny, and elsewhere. Anna Walsh is an Irish writer living in Glasgow. Their fiction has been published by Extra Teeth, Cipher Press, Gutter Mag and others, and their poetry has been published by the Stinging Fly, Bad Betty Press, SPAM and others. Essays and articles of theirs have appeared in Abridged, Club des Femmes and 3ofCups patreon. They are currently trying to finish several books.
Daughterhood Zine is edited & run by Rhiannon Auriol ig [@rhiannon.auriol] FIND DAUGHTERHOOD ONLINE @ daughterhoodzine CONTACT daughterhoodzine@gmail.com
issue three // December 2021