Skip to main content

Devour.

 I want to be digestible—

there, I said it.

I want to be the soft mouth, the wet yes, the honeyed come in,

the please, the thank you, the sorry, the good girl, the sit pretty,

the don't make a scene, the don't be difficult, the don't be so much,

the don't be so loud, the don't be so hungry, the don't be—

I want to be the thing you can swallow

without choking.

Because I am hungry.

Because I want to be held.

Because I want to be inside you

not as a stone,

but as a song.

Because my mother taught me

love is a thing you earn

by being easy,

by being good,

by being small enough

to fit

in the palm

of a hand

that closes.

BUT—

I want to stab

the guts

that digest me.

I want to be the blade in the belly,

the glass in the honey,

the bone in the throat,

the scream that comes back up

at 3 a.m.

I want to be the meal that fights back,

the communion wafer that bites,

the body of Christ that says

THIS IS MY BLOOD

AND YOU WILL

CHOKE ON IT.

I want to be loved

and I want to be devoured

and I want to devour

the thing that devours me.

I wrote it on my thighs

where the fat is stored

for winter

for famine

for the revolution

called it archive

they called it hysterical

I said:

every woman's body

is a crime scene

that keeps

its own

evidence.

The pelvis is a weapon.

The mouth is a war.

The body is a riot.

And the only way to survive

the digestion

is to become

the indigestible thing.

I screamed it

in a basement,

in my own throat,

and the walls

are still shaking.

The pretty thing

is a grenade.

The pretty doll

is a blade.

The love song

is a letter bomb.

And the only way

to be loved

by the monster

is to become

the monster

that eats

the monster.

I want to be the girl

with the most cake.

I want to be the girl

who takes

the whole fucking bakery

and burns it down

and dances

in the ashes.

Marx said change it

he didn't say but stay soft,

but stay sweet,

but stay

swallowable.

He didn't say

but make sure

they can digest you

without guilt,

without gas,

without the inconvenient

aftertaste

of your

rage.

I am tired of being the chorus.

I am tired of being the chorus.

I AM TIRED OF BEING THE CHORUS.

And still

still—

I want you to like me.

I want to be the good Marxist,

the good feminist,

the good woman

who doesn't ruin the evening

with her hunger.

But the hunger is the point.

The hunger is the wound

that won't close

because it is not

meant to.

The claw at the hollow of my throat

I say NOW.

The voice says GOOD GIRL.

The voice says BITE.

So I write it anyway.

The unbecoming thing.

The indigestible thing.

The howl that doesn't fit

in the seminar room,

or the bedroom,

or the ballot box.

I offer it to you

like a stone,

like a wound,

like a woman

who is still always

learning

how not

to apologise

for the weight

of her own

bones.

And when the room goes quiet—

when the voice that calls me hysterical

falls asleep at the wheel of its own certainty—

I put my hand

on my own

thigh.

I hold the archive.

I press the evidence

back into the body

that kept it.

I say:

I know.

I know.

I believe you.

Nobody taught me that part.

I taught myself.

The paint never fixed it.

The damp comes through anyway.

And I am still here—

still wanting,

still becoming,

still not sorry.

DEVOUR ME.

I DARE YOU.

Chew on that.

Swallow.

See what happens.

See what

comes

UP.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad Was A Sweet & Tender Hooligan...

  Dad (Right), with Derek Beackon campaigning on the Isle of Dogs, 1993. ... A Failed Fascist & Father. There is so much confusion around exactly who I am.  A Romani woman who was a child of a Neo-Nazi father. A Neo-Nazi father who, despite all my philosophical protestations otherwise, probably has been the most impactful influence on me. An anti-racist activist whose voice shakes in the guilty shadow of childhood memories of pride performing adult encouraged Sieg Heil salute.  Yet, I owe a debt to my father. I am who I am, whatever that is, because he was who he was. Not that I think he knew who he was either. Adopted by a Birmingham Catholic family and no traceable adoption records must have have him an existential void that he tried to fill with fascism. Finding a family in West Ham football hooligan gangs, singing his rage out to Screwdriver, finding a uniform to wear in the worse sides of the Skinhead movement. The only stories I heard about this childhood was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Verdict in Viscera

The nation is a white room with no corners. It smells of bleach. It smells of the sharp, metallic tang of the law. The state is not at the keyhole: it is the cold, clinical light that refuses to flicker. It is the sudden chill of the sheet against my spine. The hard, unyielding edges of the iron frame. Your mouth is a trespass on a map they have not yet digitised. A secret union of the rain-heavy moss of the island and the iron-red dust of the road. Two stolen territories finding a common border in the dark. I want to drown the sirens in the heavy, industrial heat of your throat. To feel the interior labyrinth of my blood opening like a raw, wet pulse in a room of glass. We are a tide of salt and sweat moving against the rigid architecture of the census. Our limbs tangling like the roots of a tree they tried to pave over. I feel the ceiling descending. The walls leaning in with the slow, grey gravity of an exclusion zone. But I find my space in the way your teeth catch my lower lip: a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

710 Days

They finally said the word. 710 days too late, but they said it.   Genocidal acts.   The careful counting while children stopped breathing. The documente d death, delayed decisions. The shuffle of papers while families screamed.   My Inner-Roma child asks me: "Why did they wait so long to say what we could see?"   I taste ash when I try to answer.   We know this rhythm how institutions measure murder in acceptable doses, how they academic-ise annihilation until it fits their forms.   The commission's words sit heavy in my stomach. Truth that burns the throat to speak: Recognition without action is just another form of complicity.   710 days of choosing to look away, to gather evidence instead of stopping bullets, to debate definitions while defining a people out of existence.   But some threw their bodies into the gears: Students occupying campuses, workers refusing to load weapons, artists breaking complicit silence.   The machine can be sto...
Post a Comment
Read more