And everything is shorn of emotional terrors.

On the beach is a small flag which reads patongan kepala, I am told that means ‘a piece of head’. A piece of human head is lying in the sand, a grotesque memento-mori like a quarter-yorick, and beyond the cordoning tape there is a woman doing yoga in a yellow bikini. Her skin is wrinkled tight like ( Read more... )

On the intersex debate.

In my reflex opinion there are two problems inherent to trying to lobby in the intersex debate. Firstly the people who are intersex often don’t make very good advocates; it undermines the very thing they’re striving to achieve - the recognition that we’re all just people and not determined by the markers of our gender - ( Read more... )

[what I found on my computer in the morning]

oh moth.

a moth is a trace element, a talcum scrap of night, eating helix corridors in the air, carbon paper, burnt ash of a puzzle piece escaping. up close (on my fingertips) they look like they should bite. their little violent faces.

moth-wars where the eagle-moths gulp down the teaming hordes ( Read more... )

C’s become so thin that his adam’s apple protrudes like a swallowed razor. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in weeks. He’s on the train, lurching towards me with a faceful of teeth glittering in the afternoon sun. I try to get off. He is wearing that t-shirt, milky black from too many washes, with the words ‘Life-Like’ in cracked orange across it ( Read more... )

The Stories are like viruses. Embedded in swelter jungles.

Waiting latent for hosts, circulating in fog or the muck-streams of flatworms. The Stories in pockets, teeming and boiling and cross-pollinating and all the time fervent, frothing their teeth for an unsuspecting UN peacekeeping force to bring human hair and teeth and seamy eyes into the ( Read more... )

So S.Z has acquired 70 i.v bags of rehydrating fluid from the hospital in anticipation of the Easter weekend. There was that awful incident last time when he canulated one of the ADFA boys and then gaffer-taped the bag to the back of the door and passed out on the floor, only to wake up and discover that the bag had unpeeled, unstuck and fallen to ( Read more... )

C has a new job. Gainful employment even. He is still legally a writer but this is to fill in the financial fissures, to get away from the boiling kettles, the tinned air of his building’s warrens and the twin eyes of the computer and the television.

He sits quietly on an estuary bank watching the surfaces crease like tin foil. He smokes and ( Read more... )

it’s home and off with fetid socks and the undoing of tied hair, readying to lurch into a hail of water, be panda-eyed under a burbling wet coat, oh yes, oh yes! But, as so often happens when I leave the house, a tree has appeared in the shower ( Read more... )

Ohso enamored with the thickset Italian man who makes my lunchtime coffee for a dollar fifty with a shot of ‘anti-viral’ in it… liquor for lunch every lunch for a dollar fifty and the day slips away.

Going off like a frog in a sock: The Necks Tonight.

Yesterday my boss came into my office and announced “Rebecca, I have one word for you - Cocaine. You smackhead”, and then left.

In a meeting later in the day he congratulated me for my work “given the trouble you’ve been having.”

And just this morning I have an email which hints at the illegal importation of macaws (wtf?) and says - I see you ( Read more... )