The Sound Of Bo Belle

Iman Poorfarokh © Love, we were taught, comes in one colour: white dress, white lies, white picket certainty. But I have learned it bleeds in shades bruise-purple of almost, scar-pink of too late, the sick yellow of timing that mocks us with its cruelty. I am washing dishes when your message arrives my hands in grey water, grease floating like small continents And I have to grip the counter because your words three lines, nothing profound undo me in ways I didn't know I could come apart. You've misspelt "definitely" again, that specific failure of autocorrect you never fix, and you always sign off with "x" even in serious messages, that small intimacy you give to everyone and it's this, these stupid details, that makes me want to burn my life down. The tea towel in my hand still smells of last night's dinner, ordinary things, the architecture of a life I built because I was too afraid to build anything else, and on my phone: another notification, ano...

The scarlet stain, they ram it on us, a badge, a violated prayer, across the chest, a scar they brand. But whose fallen? I snarl. Whose? Not the children of Palestine, not those pulverised beneath the boot of empire, power’s cold, unyielding embrace. They gasp, "never again," a hollow echo, a festering lie, as genocides gorge themselves, sickening, under a blood-soaked sky. And the galling farce of it, So soon after Soldier F walks free, justice butchered, a cold, unfeeling report. The royals, pomp and circumstance, a gilded cage of grief, their diamond tears, cold, their sorrow, brief, a performance for the cameras. While land chokes on the rot of shattered bodies, from Derry to the Dnieper, they lay their wreaths like blindfolds, and the true cost, it just keeps gaping, a wound that will not close, a putrid scar. This poppy, stained, once a field of Flanders' sorrow, a torn flag in the mud, blood-soaked earth, now a corporate brand, shoved down our throats for tomorrow....

Listverse© The air, it's not dust,  It's the pulverised bones of every promise they ever choked on, a fine, grey ash, gritty, like ground-down teeth,  coating the back of our throats, dulling our thoughts. We breathe their lies, a caustic fume, acrid on the tongue,  a poison gas burning our throats raw,  scarring our collective lungs to leather. Truth, a whisper lost in the digital static,  the endless scrolling, a memory dissolving,  like smoke from a burning flag,  into a disinterested, apathetic sky, cold and unblinking, like a surveillance camera. Gaza, a ripped-out heart, still beating, somehow, a phantom ache in this world's numb, gold-plated ribcage. Sudan, a slow, red seep, the desert floor drinking it down, insatiable. The earth itself weeping, a silent, crimson river, unseen, unheard, by those whose ledgers swell in the silence. Congo's ancient agony, a primal scream torn from the earth's core, born again and again, a fresh harvest of sufferi...