Read to me from the book where the light changes and makes me sing in your arms I am open - mouthed for you I am a lonely girl missing their mother,
Weird hush of the day at this time, my lipstick burns your cheek, we both notice all embarrassed and loving thinking about our boring childhoods we look sad and beautiful,
when we want to feel real and grownup we turn on the news and watch the rebel forces take another city we stroke each other’s ears and sleep like puppies, and wake and check the time dinner will be late and sloppy and we’ll forget to fuck. I pick the glass out from the corners of your fur you cannot reach we suckle at each other’s mouths and dream of still life,
rain nearly wakes us but we sleep through it, I get up to vomit, in the morning the street will still be there and we will discuss again whether magic exists, we both have some feeling of god trapped in our mouths like a useless second tongue.
One day I’ll ride an empty train asleep and think of you limp and faraway and carefully, you are pierced out of me, a terrible organ, I wake you another night to complain I ask, how do I feel, you say everything’s alright
The space between us is a glorious sore I suck, I am hopeful that we will never die but sometimes as you are a man I am a woman and it hurts hold to the origins, the bed is always wet on your side little boy, little underwear, little love little to no future little bit of sick in the corner of the room & the two of swords etched in ultrasound memory like the sea
as it stretches on behind the blindfolded woman who clutches two swords across her chest beat beat the little fist in my abdomen the train thru the old country to the airport you in your bed asleep and fingers touch the sheets sudden rain, screen collapsed inward the ancient mind of it the wet shape, rocks surge thru sudden city, our secret letters the blindfolded woman the sea behind her the swords across her chest arching for battle, I slip thru dreams and the truth of all chemicals all interpretations proven incorrect we reduced to salt
the woman, her swords, her blindfold, the wide open sea fall back asleep, into the holes that keep appearing behind us like an old dog who has lost his jaw.
Here’s my poem from 2014, the two of swords ⚔
Huh! Alice Notley also wrote a poem called Two of Swords ✨✨
This collection was put together over a few days after the result of the EU referendum last Friday, in late June, 2016.
Some of the writing in it directly reflects that result. Some too is still in mourning after the massacre in Orlando. Some may have nothing explicit to do with recent events; it was an open invitation to submit work. But that invitation was made right on the day of the result. We do have friends making a similarly immediate ‘Brexit’ book.
This contains work by: anon., Rees Arnott-Davies, Ben Austwick, Frankie Basweld, cris cheek, Megan Clifton, Sam Cutting, Richard Dodwell, Caitlín Doherty, Emu Extraordinaire, Dominic Fox, Ben Graham, Rob Halpern, Caspar Jade Heinemann, Ben Hickman, Lisa Jayne, Antony John, Justin Katko, Laura Kilbride, Francesca Lisette, Ed Luker, Alex MacDonald, Sally Mercer, Kev Nickells, Ingrid Plum, Nat Raha, Daniel Spicer, Verity Spott, Rob Stanton, Kesh St Hewind, Keston Sutherland, Michael Tencer, Timothy Thornton, trad. (rewritten by The Black Smock Band), Dolly Turing, Karl M V Waugh, Naomi Weber, and Eley Williams.
Hopefully you’ll distribute it as widely as you can! both online, and by printing loads of copies and giving them to everybody. Rinse your work printer.
Or, if your printer doesn’t do it automatically, here are two PDFs, which you can use to print on the front and back of 13 sheets of A4, and then fold them up into a booklet.
As we fall deeper into
love and years go on, we build up resistance to each other’s fluids.
I no longer wait next to you as you piss, playfully reaching my hand
into your piss stream, turning to you with a smile. Now I lie my head
down on this desk, watching leaves blowing off trees through the wind with no care listening to you move around in another room.
(Now I
am old, I am drunk more and less humourless. I sleep longer, like I
did when I was a baby, and then a teenager. I place plastic flowers
in big clay pots of soil and water them daily, and check on their
progress, and think ah, what a brilliant gardener I am. The day starts and ends, somewhere below the heart. What does the lung remember,
the liver, about who and how and where I loved? Which organs never felt that love, only the pain of its departure, or not even.
Now when I am old I might decide
I liked my hair like that, greasy. My fingers through it like a dirty
man in an old song.
Read to me from the book where the light changes and makes me sing in your arms I am open - mouthed for you I am a lonely girl missing their mother,
Weird hush of the day at this time, my lipstick burns your cheek, we both notice all embarrassed and loving thinking about our boring childhoods we look sad and beautiful,
when we want to feel real and grownup we turn on the news and watch the rebel forces take another city we stroke each other’s ears and sleep like puppies, and wake and check the time dinner will be late and sloppy and we’ll forget to fuck. I pick the glass out from the corners of your fur you cannot reach we suckle at each other’s mouths and dream of still life,
rain nearly wakes us but we sleep through it, I get up to vomit, in the morning the street will still be there and we will discuss again whether magic exists, we both have some feeling of god trapped in our mouths like a useless second tongue.
One day I’ll ride an empty train asleep and think of you limp and faraway and carefully, you are pierced out of me, a terrible organ, I wake you another night to complain I ask, how do I feel, you say everything’s alright
The space between us is a glorious sore I suck, I am hopeful that we will never die but sometimes as you are a man I am a woman and it hurts hold to the origins, the bed is always wet on your side little boy, little underwear, little love little to no future little bit of sick in the corner of the room & the two of swords etched in ultrasound memory like the sea
as it stretches on behind the blindfolded woman who clutches two swords across her chest beat beat the little fist in my abdomen the train thru the old country to the airport you in your bed asleep and fingers touch the sheets sudden rain, screen collapsed inward the ancient mind of it the wet shape, rocks surge thru sudden city, our secret letters the blindfolded woman the sea behind her the swords across her chest arching for battle, I slip thru dreams and the truth of all chemicals all interpretations proven incorrect we reduced to salt
the woman, her swords, her blindfold, the wide open sea fall back asleep, into the holes that keep appearing behind us like an old dog who has lost his jaw.
spring
There’s a little blue inside me like a wing’s bright tip Just a smudge at the core where I am gun slips beyond fingers out to sea air is so nearly water that I can’t help but Drown
–
I want to be a kind of woman, The kind who is quietly lying on the floor belly down while another woman wanders around the room arranging things & feeling the bugs lapping up against the corners of the house we take our shoes and socks off and open the windows and feel young and torn like the wind up our skirts and surviving
–
u fill me with light & noise, an edge that glints like grey eye shadow / back to the top of the air as it hurts, the pop songs leaking out of us my Protestant body is weird and
soft, sifts by unnoticed but for the pieces of my womb lining that I leave wherever I go & don’t know how to stop
. god is slow and burnt – skin is torn around my lips
and shitty painted nails wait for summer where cunt drips blue sunrise stinks out the house hold me to it my ephemera my Purple dust clouds the dent I am throwing my neck out crossing myself,
guzzling these sugary treats and turning up at your place of work to be moody and beg for kisses
& as i fade at edges quieter into the behind face of my never quite ruined, an aching can be a lightness, and the tulips I sit down to draw
This is one of the few books that has made me – along with everyone I know who has read it – weep. I think it’s tremendously important, and I think more people should read it. The above passage is pp.46-8, in Sarah Schulman, Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)
“Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’”
