The Sound Of Bo Belle

They did not ask if you were whole, only where the other lived in your soul. A black man in the dreaming spires. A walking myth for their late-night wires. A creature of strange design. A boundary line. And I know that look. The measuring gaze. The parts that fit. The parts they won't. A Roma woman with Irish blood, standing in mud they call pure. I know the weight of a name that is not your own, a history you carry in your bones, alone. Did you feel the púca's breath? The whisper: You don't belong. You are the chorus. Never the song. Every achievement, a raven's cry. The Badb circling. They want to know if you're really real, if your struggle is holy, or just a deal. They'd follow you to the Otherworld gate, to photograph the bruise, to print the grey. And the pressure, brother, is a dolmen balanced on a bed of bone. To be the best. To be the first. To be the proof. The example. The single seed. The Tuatha Dé Danann taught us to fight. But they also taught us t...

i. you named the thread count of my sheets from the feel of them before you'd opened your eyes you are like that ii. some people love the way they rehearsed it from a script they didn't write in a room that was never theirs you love with the lights on you love having already mapped the room the frequency the exact pitch of a thing before you speak its name there is no performance in it i didn't know where to put my hands iii. and then i did the way you go still when something is exactly right not translating it not performing receiving the direct line from the nerve i learned to wait for that to want nothing until it iv. i have watched you trace the seam in the ceiling plaster where the damp came through last winter and the landlord never fixed v. you arrived not became arrived the person you always were walking in out of the weather sitting down like the room had been waiting it had it had vi. your heart is not a closed room and some people call that reckless some people c...

come here I said it once and the city heard it the pavement heard it the man three doors down pulling the shutter down heard the cost of it the specific frequency of a woman calling to another woman in the dark come here the street at 2am is sodium light on the curve of a shoulder on the deliberate walk of a woman who has paid to be standing here moving towards exactly what she wants your hands already moving before I finish the sentence your hands knowing without asking the curve of the hip the held breath the place where the skin runs warm and thin and answers I have your collar in my hand I am not gentle about it you don't need gentle you need the other thing the honest thing the thing I've been thinking about since the bar since the cigarette since the first time you looked at me like a problem you'd already solved and I looked back like I'd already said yes and thought nothing more of it which was everything your weight against mine worth every year it cost every q...

The Morrígan claws at the hollow of your throat: A hard insurrection of spit and salt. Your hair is a thicket of night, heavy and uncombed, A dark, tangled fleece where the old gods go to hide. You are the girl the peat could not finish, Dredged up, heavy and shimmering with black water, More visceral than the dry myths they traded at the altar. Your skin is limestone worn to velvet by the Atlantic: A softness achieved through the violence of the tide. It is the same grey miracle of your breathing, Skin worn down by the grit of the struggle, By the friction of the laws and the clinical stares, Until only this impossible tenderness remains. I sink into the weight of your thighs, Those white pillars where the Cailleach left her thumbprints, Broad and certain, a geography I claim with my mouth. The clinic was a cold stone, a winter without a fire. They wanted you quiet, a specimen in a jar, But here the Bog Queen rises in the dark, Thighs like white thorns, a mouth like a wound. I find th...

The Lee is a black gut, a slick trench of ancient silt where the tide comes to die against the concrete,  and I love it for its refusal to be clean. I love this city for its damp, rebellious lungs and the way it exhales salt and coal dust over the docks. The rain is a communal levy we pay in shivering bones and the slow rot of damp wool,  a grey currency that buys us the right to belong to the mud. Look at the Northside. Look at how the hills crowd the river like a mob waiting for the word. She brings the city in with her. The grime of the Quays is a fine silt in the creases of her elbows,  a salt-crust on the new architecture of her neck. She stands in the centre of a room that smells of cheap gin  and the sharp, clinical sting of the vial on the bedside table. A small, glass insurrection. The skin is a graft. It is a borrowed coat that has finally begun to pulse with the heat of her own blood,  smelling of the sharp, metallic tang of hormones and the sweet, he...

 This is for the phallic monument built on a foundation of female teeth. This is for the patriarchal idiocy that confuses a biological urge with a mandate to govern. This is for the leaking vessel of senile lust in the White House. This is for the walking autopsy held together by the starch of state secrets and the grey fluid of the unprotected. He doesn’t just sniff the hair of the future. He licks the sweat from the brows of the condemned to see if the meat is seasoned enough for the slaughter. This is for the geriatric infection presiding over a hospice of empire. This is for the dark bile of every drone strike swirling in his gut like a toxic weather system. He is the grandfather of the mass grave and you are the ones who keep the oxygen flowing into his necrotic lungs. This is for the glowing colostomy bag of the television. It leaks the image of the celebrated predator into your living room. This is for the fighter in the centre of the ring. A god for the boys who want to be ...

For Caffy I think all my friends are from Tir na nóg the sideways people with a silver branch in their hands the ones who don’t quite fit the skin they were born in sitting on the edge of a western sea on another planet of water where the tea is brewed from the dew of the hazel of wisdom And the sugar we share is the crushed bone of a dead empire. We are looking out over to Rocklands where the grey stones are beginning to breathe and the moss is whispering secrets to the soles of our boots. They are the rulebreakers the ones who forgot how to tell the time on an iron clock The artists who paint with the sap of the rowan tree the outsiders with wings tucked under their thrift store coats. I see them, and I see the Tuatha Dé Danann drinking cold coffee and talking about the moon. they lean back Changelings left in the crib of the city there to remind the concrete how to dream carrying the health of Tír na mBeo in their marrow while the rest of the world decays in the grey light. An other...

 Five thousand blazers in a single quad. A sea of wool and cold entitlement. The weight of five thousand men standing on the chest of one girl. We can hear the ribs snapping under the pressure of the endowment. The alumni. The legacy. The Board of Governors. The organisation. They are not anomalies. They are the curriculum. They are the architecture. The porcelain cold of the dormitory floors where the secret is ironed into the sheets. We cannot breathe under the sheer volume of the share. They starch the collars to hide the bite marks. They use the Latin for reputation to bury the English for rape. The news calls it a guest commentary. We call it the logistics of a war zone. The Kansas City Star is just one witness in a global organisation of silence. Editorial cowardice as a form of active participation. The opinion is a bandage on a decapitation. The ink is a bribe. The paper is a shroud. CNN uncovers the hidden world. Sixty two million visits in a single month. Motherless dot c...

  If Jesus was real, he would not arrive in a halo of soft focus. He would be a postcode in a rubble-strewn district of the Levant. A wet rattle of grey dust returning from the ruin of a Gazan high-rise. An Arab man with the dirt of the occupation under his fingernails. The genealogy of the dispossessed written in the sweat on his brow. He would be the immigrant stumbling through the Kentish surf. Lungs a heavy sponge of salt and oil and death. A stateless ghost in a high-vis world that only counts the dead. What if he returned as Hind Rajab? Six years of light extinguished in the back of a black Kia. Surrounded by the cold metal of his own people’s ghosts. Screaming into a dead phone line while the tanks hummed their low mechanical hymn. The red machinery of the heart stopped by a precision strike. No angels came to the rescue. Only the dial tone and the smell of scorched upholstery. A child’s blood staining the map of a promised land. What if he was the miscarried hope in a water...

They voted today in the Knesset to kill Palestinian children legally,  and Ben Gvir handed out sweets, Let me say that again they handed out sweets, they handed out sweets, they handed out fucking sweets, like it was a birth, like his wife just pushed out something worth celebrating, passed candy hand to hand, sugar dissolving on tongues while the law passed, making murder clean, making murder parliamentary, making murder something you can taste,  But this isn't new, this is the echo, this is the rope still swinging. 1930, Mandatory Palestine,  Fuad Hijazi, Ata al-Zeer, Mohammad Jamjoum, hanged in Acre prison by the British, their necks snapping, clean, legal, parliamentary.  The British measured the drop, calculated the weight, made sure the neck would break, not strangle, efficient, humane,  that's what they called it, humane hanging. for resisting occupation.  Then they hung more than 100 Palestinians,  kept the rope warm,  kept the gallows bus...

 The island is a suppurating pelvic floor. A hip bone rising from the grey silt of the Atlantic, pinned under the weight of a fifty-storey phallus of glass and steel, an engorged monument to the theft of breath and the industrialisation of the womb. This is the medical report of the siege. The light is a brownout. The light is a flicker. The light is the dying pulse of a patient on the table. It is the smell of sweat, diesel, and the sharp metallic tang of a speculum in a cold room. The blockade is a catheter of rusted iron, draining the vitality of the state into the gutters of the north. Donald Trump is the rapist in the room. He is a creature of cold fat and expensive grease; His pores leak black industrial oil onto the pale linen of the bedsheets. He does not look at the face. He looks at the soil as if it were a slit in a dress. He looks at the child as if she were a map to be folded and tucked into a pocket of debt. He’s a man who knows a little about small islands. He knows ...

They gave the boys the soldier with the eagle eye And the hollow crotch The Action Man with the scar on his cheek and the kung-fu grip A plastic preview of the violence they would later call protection. We were the static brides in the cardboard boxes The ones with the painted-on knickers And the legs that never bent. They taught us the shape of our servitude Before we could even spell the word. A dress rehearsal for the pleasure of the architects Who carved us into the little men and little women they needed To fill the kitchens of the houses they built for us. They defined us by the weight of the air between our thighs A cacophony of silence where the map was blank But the borders were strictly enforced. We grew up in a house of euphemisms Where the body was a series of rooms, we were forbidden to enter. They taught us to be defined by our genitals Whilst never giving us the language to name them. But in the shadows of the toy chest, we were already playing rebellion. Every girl grin...

  The sun is a jaundiced Eve bulging over the city a yellow cyst ripening in a sky the colour of a bruised lung The developers are pouring liquid lead into the throat of the soil asphyxiating the earth until the worms turn to grey ash They are harvesting the shade and bottling our panic for the shareholders The concrete is a calcified tumour growing over the common while you sit across from me in your bias cut spite My mirror leech My shadow twin with the structural tailoring and the serrated smile You look at me like a sample sale you can’t quite afford to mock Every word you speak is a fine needle under my fingernails Your envy is a starving animal snapping at the light Bewildered by the way you want to harvest the salt from my scars just to season the flat taste of your own boredom You want to wear my breath like a vintage brooch I am a toxic acre you can't gentrify with a grin You want to wear my face like a filter and my voice like a trend Your solidarity is a starched collar ...

The city is a broken jaw spitting teeth of glass and scorched limestone We are huddled in the throat of the city waiting for the state’s iron machinery of debt to lay its eggs of fire Your hand moves beneath my coat not like a lover but like a surgeon seeking a bullet The siren is a long grey needle stitching our nerves into the floorboards I feel safe in the heat of you a desperate furnace against the coming frost of the blitz You taste of smudged kohl and cheap perfume The grit of the mortar on your nape is the only seasoning left in this starving town We are a mess of silk and shrapnel Your stockings torn by the jagged edge of a fallen beam I am tracing the line of your Adam's apple where the powder has cracked into a map of trenches There is no man or woman in the dark of the shelter only the frantic animal and the chemical scent of the chemist’s shop We are the trash of the empire glittering in the mud of the black market Your mouth is a bruised plum bleeding into the collar o...

I’m sitting at the feet of a dead soldier who never asked to be a monument and a man at the Roma Memorial this morning said he didn’t understand why GYPSIES had a memorial said in the way you say why is there a step here when you’ve never been made to sleep in the rain My blood is older than his question My blood has been answering his question with its absence for five hundred years and my phone buzzes Someone’s fingers sending me sweet things I’ve been thinking about you — and I’ve been thinking about them too about the architecture of their hands the particular weight of want that has no politics Just skin animal fact Just the weight of it Just — but I’m sitting here at the feet of a man made of stone Who died for something or was told he did and Europe is voting again and the votes are looking familiar and I wonder what he knew about that the boy they cast in bronze the boy who bled in the snow for something called the future before the future learned to goosestep again in Italian ...