It begins lower than language, a warmth gathering where thought can’t quite follow, a slow ignition that doesn’t need permission to become itself. She feels it before she names it - that pull, that answering deep in the body’s interior, as if something long patient has turned towards the light at last. And when the word comes, it moves through her like rhythm already underway, carried in the hips, the mouth, the small involuntary arch that knows exactly where it’s going. Yes

Not the blaze of roses, not their cliche insistence, but this delicate blossom - a kind of arrival so gentle you could miss it if you were thinking of something or someone else. All winter the branches have held their breath, black script against a sky that wouldn’t answer. Oh how, we learned the grammar of endurance: how to wait, how to close down, how to be smaller than we are. But now - as if the air itself had loosened - they open. Not fully, not all at once, but in a sca

"The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master." - Elizabeth Bishop, One Art Loss has always had a strange aesthetic in literature. Why? Because it is rarely presented purely as absence and is instead framed as the condition through which the world becomes newly visible. So

I like opening the peach with my thumbs, the seam loosening until the fruit parts in my hands, oozing with an orange river that floods the blue roads of my wrist. Give me pears dense with rain, pomegranates split with their red constellations, and cherries so ripe they bruise when I breathe on them. Tell me what to do for I’m tired of arranging the world myself. Yes, hand me the bowl and watch as the fruit gathers here on the marble, each piece opened, each stone lifted out a

There is a room where laughter settles into the walls as if it had always belonged there, where glass refracts light into soft geometries that make brightness feel effortless, and where fabric skims the body lightly enough to suggest that joy can be worn without consequence. Here, in this domed cathedral, the air carries a subtle lift, a sense that gravity has agreed to loosen its hold for the evening, and everything within that architecture appears balanced, luminous, intact

After Chelsea DesAutels Start this one with the woman falling from the sky. Or the building - it doesn't matter. What matters is she's plummeting in vomitous swirls towards a fuse, and she knows, at this point, having lived two decades of blueness and four years of bliss, that there's nothing else she can do - No threshhold between love and letting go, or between letting go and longing - no demarcation she can draw around herself to stop the charcoaled edges of her bones from

It did not unravel - it split like crockery dropped on tiles - that sharp, unarguable sound of splintering then the silence that follows. One morning the air was ordinary, but by evening it had teeth that bit at the threads of the tapestry, until the pattern forgot itself. The flat - half-packed, half-lived-in - began to echo before I left it with drawers open like gossiping mouths, and ash on the sofa where friendships had burnt. Love did not fade, it vanished mid-sentence,

A friend mentioned The Worst Person in the World  to me a long time ago when they were going through a rough time and the fallout effect of not quite knowing where to place yourself in the world. When describing the film to me originally, she'd said, almost casually, “Trust me, you’ll love it when you need it. " Well, turns out she was right and I wildly underestimated just how good it would be. Watching The Worst Person in the World feels less like watching a film and more

I didn't fall apart the way I expected, which surprised me. There is grief, yes, pain, yes, a narrowing, long ache in the chest, yes - but also a strange openness, where breath continues like a horizon, persisting without permission against the sea-line of each hour. It is true, what they say - that suffering is not a cliff but a slope. You lean into it deeply, stare up at its summit, adjust your footing, stumbling and screaming against the Sisyphean Hell of it but you move t

I unbury the girl, drag her tiny limbs from the earth-rot in my chest where I keep her hidden.     She wakes with a sharp sob, toddles aimlessly in the dark room, then folds onto the floor under the heavy shell on her back & cannot muster the strength to get up again.   So, I soothe her, holding myself softly by the ribs at night, until a dawn-haze floods the room, lifting the shell off her unscathed, fleshy body, as we face each other naked in the light.   Her name is my nam

The evergreen and the deciduous yearn for one another’s company, To intertwine their vines as one again. Starved of touch and camaraderie, They age with April’s adolescent ache. Delay their reunion, I say. Let me pluck the leaves from each branch before they get chance. Paint them as burnt and iridescent of an orange, To confound the crowns of the trees, And the scents of the soil, So they surrender their seasonal resurrection to you. And bow quietly, they will, To your garde

Anger is without doubt one of the most fundamental human emotions we possess and yet, somehow it is also one of the most politically...

All night, the vines held tight to the trellis, struggling green fingers strangling wood, grape-bodies hanging heavy, their skins...

There it was: the twisting, rusting, metallic ruin of my past whose oily creases shimmered iridescent against the onyx of half-forgotten...