An artist can lure us
Into a darkened room
And paint a portrait
With borrowed light

I am here
Expelled at last from that warm darkness
Fluid replaced with air
Crying out so that the nurse knows,
So that the world knows,
That I have arrived.

I look up and see a Goddess
A true beauty with loose ringlets
And glimmering skin
But sacred tears are falling
From her golden eyes

A deity like her deserves jewels
I am just a tiny speck of dust
Floating around her palace
I am not what she asked for

I want to apologise
But all I can do is wail
I am sorry, dear Goddess

She looks down at me
And she smiles

And in that moment I’ve been blessed.

A tiny pill, less than fingernail-size
Washed down with water each day.
You’d think nothing of it.
It’s just like clockwork.

It does its job.
You marvel at science
And you marvel at being a woman
Just how does your body do it?
You wonder each day.

Now there is less blood
But more bleeding
Less pain
But more suffering

As the months pass you start to realise something.
You’d rather tear out your own hair
Than tear out your own ******
You’d rather be drenched with blood
Than drenched with sadness and anger

Once a month you wish you were dead.
The pill laughs.
Once a month you cry yourself to sleep
Just because somebody looked at you funny.

This tiny tiny thing
Smaller than your fingernail
May be making it easier to be a woman
But it’s making it harder to be you.

What could have happened
if things had not gone this way?
Why keep wondering?
Why not get out of this place
and find out once and for all?

I don't call people 'temporary'.
I prefer to call them guests.
Guests are people who come into your house
But don't make it their home.
You can try to persuade them to.
You can even try and beg them to.
But they prefer their own place,
and besides,
they're not particularly fond of your decor.

At first it mattered to her –
The way they looked.
The way they spun words from their mouths
Like silk
And wrapped her in them.
When they gazed into her eyes every fibre of her being
Would quiver.
When they were angry
Their cheekbones would form ghostly ravines.

But she learned not to fall for the pretty ones.
She still sees their faces every night
Taunting.
They ask her why she ran away.
Her mother asks,
“What kind of man will you date next?”
She replies,
“One without a head.”

I am not the storm.
I am the freshly-soaked earth.
I am the vivid petals of the quenched flowers.
I am the hazy sunlight glowing between the clouds.
I am the sound of the birds as they return to sing once more.
I am the gentle breeze caressing each and every tree.
I am the cracked flags drying in the afternoon sun.
I am the umbrella discarded in the porch.
I am not the storm.
When the rain stops,
I come alive.

After a while you’ll stop caring about him, but then you’ll find yourself wondering if he still has the mug you made for him in pottery class and if every time he sees it he remembers the smile you wore from ear to ear as he took it out of its newspaper wrapping because that smile meant a hell of a lot more than a mug ever could but neither was enough to make him stay.

You remember my name.
You remember how it sounds when spoken aloud.
You remember how it looks when written in black ink.
You remember the face that goes with it.


I remember nothing of you.
No name, no sound, no face.
Some would call it a tragedy.
But I call it freedom.

She said my eyes were like stars that day
We'd been kissed by a flurry of leaves -
Autumn in the forest.
She said my mouth was so wide
I could've caught flies in it.
"Isn't the forest beautiful?"
She'd asked on gentle breath.
"Yeah," I said,
"I ******* love trees."

She sits and paints and her conscience speaks.
“This means you’re healing,” it says.
She smiles and cleans her brush.
“Who’d have thought it would be so colourful,” she says.
There are tears in her eyes.

He came in winter
But by spring your love had thawed
Summer makes you cry;
You still remember the way
The autumn winds blew him home.

She could talk endlessly about
the way her gut the way her whole abdomen
pulses for just a few days each month
agonisingly cruelly internally she bleeds
she bleeds she bleeds she bleeds

She’ll write an article about a girl she knew
who stuffed toilet paper from the college bathroom
into her underwear because and she’ll quote
“it’s better than nothing” she eats one meal a day
at home and that is it

She’ll do a speech about how the
contraceptive pill can do psychological damage
she’ll mention the time her best friend
asked if Cilest is meant to make you
want to **** yourself
“At least her boyfriend is happy” she’ll say and
the audience will laugh as if it is a joke.

She’ll ask her manager if she can go
home because her *** is giving her
blurred vision and she is struggling to stand and
he’ll ask why this month is any
different to the others

She’ll ask you if you think it’s
fair that shedding lining costs money that
contraception costs sanity that pain is
only valid if you’re dying and
you’ll tell her to stop being gross and
she’ll say Only when you start listening.

If nobody has told you yet:
You are brave for doing what you did.
Everybody knows it.
I just thought it was about time you knew it too.

Every night is the same.
"Tonight's the night!" she'll exclaim.

Then she'll hit the town
lips coated in red, eyes agleam.

The only problem is that it never ends up being 'the night'.
Or perhaps it does.
Nobody can really tell.
She's never told anyone what 'the night' is.

How long has she been saying that for?" one person asks.
"As long as I can remember," another replies.
Maybe tonight will be the night.

Whatever that means.

My grandma told me I don't need a man's affection
To be happy
But Grandma,
What if the affection is all I have to free me
From my sadness?

They say that one hundred years ago
Women ‘earned’ the right to vote
It makes you wonder what men did
To earn that right before us.
It must’ve been something pretty impressive.

The most heartbreaking thing
He said to me was
"I promise I'll come back."
Not because he didn't
But because for a moment
Even he was convinced that he would.