historical bed sores

some women cup their breasts and women without breasts chirp at the thought

women hold their babies up to the light and the women without babies weep at the thought

women with tears in their eyes with gas in their mouth can pose with tigers in the bath

tigerless women check the number of breasts their childless heads their breastless chests

their sore bone rectangular, triangular

armless kids climbed inside a clock

the women with no breasts with red gruesome hair are kin

prepare bowls of hot gum

in our bellies

we have clowns and bugs

we have mock breasts and bellies like bowls of hot gum

frig the dried blue men

a soup for my sister a new earhole where her wound is a light

the women without babies sing into cat bellies

we hunt for sliced up income

for mamma’s dark red underwear

strong girls breathing in rivers

drinking out of each other   speaking out of each other’s backs

sing for our empty friend

some river bellies some ocean some singular bump

health custard

bomb shoes

who killed our cave? who let out our weal?

a cave for my baby

a rubber ball full of honey

without babies we chirp into caves into everybody’s cave

drinking a pool of tomato pips and the last strings of egg

delicious forever

find a cave for my injured friend

Spirited Pictures

An aerial photograph of antelope
black sesame seeds on a plate
are not insects
I am not a sporty god or ghost
my insect head sweats it is going to picture
keeld huts
dark burns on the sea
The image isn’t magic
the dints on Her fruit face
Her finger-pocked dream is not an aerial photograph
of rats in flooded tanks
or black seeds surrounding a pie
There is no God’s eye view of this bed
of mating ladybirds in lava
A plate is murky I say
to the pie
I am not your god
but I have licked you full of paradoxes
Tinnitus and the neighbour’s oi!
are not song
Pierced drum skin
your fingers finger in
Aerial antelope and sesame seeds are not insects
that bite and drill
that little mad and stamp
They are not insects that bite and drill
like the body at the hook of a mouth is
spotted with weird phonemes
But this is not its autopsy
This is not the holographic autopsy
of an ancient mummified corpse

The Mystic Derives Pleasure from Her Vision of the Crucified Christ (Masturbating with Sea Shells) 

an empty shell, a non-state object
can be reclaimed for its summed crinkles
and a money-smooth cuttlebone.
She tested
value in polymer rubble   we tested
special thread. I said soak, said I was a hairy pipe.
Upon the collection like hybrid wealth
we sit one each groaning

laced different to love.
Lipping up to double our
communal acts of dislodged naughts

repeat kink
into a supernatural and ekstatic
houring of shapes.

Read it in the long oil spilt study of miracles—
Autoeroticism is synced
to nonproduction to music that she calls
her little “chickens.”

I found a death perched at the ridge
from lucy to whiskey burn.
Sat in a row holding our knees jeering
at the wobbling  sunset, drawn
like a comedy on Roman mosaic.

We can use jelly from the ray’s nest
we can use jelly like utility
we can use
Wine  Best
Wine
Cheapest
wine  Best


Poems selected by Sophie Robinson, our virtual poet in residence for the October / November Issue of The Believer.

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