Megan
I chewed bricks, stacked fish fingers in the year the dust jacket tells me you were born. Did you crack open the front door’s egg at seventeen, the unmembraned light a terrible welling? Did your hair fall lankly in your face, eyeliner wobbling along the waterline? The greatest cities already called to you as I conjugated spots, picked verbs until they bled. They prised you out and placed you In a smoke filled room where being small and new could make your other gifts seem preternatural, the mic popping, exploding candy of your mind, though crucially your body paid the price. And now your essays tell how broken you were: our sad girl blogs condensed into one congested voice on Radio 4, or in conversation with your peers who spoke to the cities and also heard the cities speaking back, their broken shells deep under soil in suburbs that said nothing in the first place, where we eat passwords, forget a hearty breakfast, greenly making something out of nothing.
Shower of Bastards
Someone told me birdsong was about either sex or territory: into the soft parts of the day calling wanna fuck wanna fuck wanna fuck or maybe fuck off fuck off fuck off as if in the wee small hours I haven’t swung around a lamppost saying worse to the pearling sky. One minute you’re there, next you’re in the spa shower on a deal hoping not to catch your likeness in a surface. Thunder rolls and the light alternates in crayon colours. You control the climate, salt spray overhead, a storm’s dread heart cut out and thrown to the tiles at your feet, a slight slipperiness over a grate then gone. More birds now. Is this a shampoo advert, forest, blue waterfall, orchid perched improbably in the hair stingless fish darting, the best self in the mind’s kind eye (a brusque deep cough outside, slap of flipflop on the tired tile) or how it was always meant to be? Real scattered light, sigh of leaves you are singing your heart out now fuck off fuck off fuck off
Rebecca O’Hagan is a writer and artist from Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in Poetry Scotland, Wrong Directions, The Basilisk Tree, and elsewhere. She is the author of zines Spa Pool, The Best Supermarket in Edinburgh, and Cherry Print.