There are bones in the garden. They rattle in my sleep and play tunes upon my teeth, but once I wake, they’re as dead as the pets they once lived within. The ground’s frosty. When I place my feet on it, my balls go rock hard and tiny. As tiny as Elton John’s Tiny Dancer, or perhaps the tiny dreams of a child playing in some green field in the shade of a school that no longer exists. Somewhere on a nearby street is a girl who looks like the kid in The Exorcist. The kid in question is no longer a kid nor a girl but a woman. We’re all women, one way or another. We all smoke cigarettes, and we all swallow the stars in the same way we swallow spiders with the lights out—big ones with hairy legs as hairy as my beard. There’s magic in this beard and the odd white hair, not to mention bits of food and chicken bones I feed to the foxes that circle the trees that speak my name at three in the morning—that time when the fledgling arsonists of this world are at their most dastardly. You’ve got the cutest lower lip. When you pout and stick it out, I’m driven wild and I can’t quite help the way it makes me feel. And those dark circles around your eyes; such fertile ground for love. In the garden, there are birds that are actually dinosaurs. They flap their wings and sing and as I slip out of my winter skin, for a moment or so I feel okay.

A Journal for Damned Lovers UK

A Journal for Damned Lovers US

Anthology UK / Anthology US