Author Archives: (Not actually a Lady) Ruthless

we’re all looking for someone in our livesgrasping at the wrong shoulder in the darkand holding on with grim-jawed stubbornnessas the one we want observes us and sighsand opens a newspaper for the waitlong and white and as clinically coldas a hospice corridor; its lights blinkand the water in the cooler is stale,and swims withContinue reading “Knucklebone”

I wake with a skull-biting migraine around midday, as always, forever too tired to greet the morning. My mouth is as thick as linen, and I wouldn’t get up at all if the wardrobe weren’t so eager to dress me, which she does, in blue and white, like the habit of a nun I onceContinue reading “The Beauty In The Bell Jar”

it was a bare and barren nobody,that afternoon, wet air and sodden earth the razed umber of a firebird’s huetrod in by wading footfalls, and the sunbored through the trees a red and dripping holelike a gunshot, bruising the sky yellowand the moist clouds, dragging their crumbling tails,drew words and features long-condemned to fadebefore theyContinue reading “That Afternoon”

my old clothes don’t fit anymore I try them on again, sometimes, to seeif they flatter me still- there are daysthat they do, jarring as a flowerin the dregs of a nuclear ruin, and days that they don’t- I feel like oil on a blackroad, all thin-film and refraction:this dress I hoard, another given awaymakingContinue reading “Old Clothes”

their threat was a tubeand a starch white bedas if I was some suffragettein a cell that I had chosen as if I was thin-fingered malicewith a scheme on the skinof my kneeswhen I shrieked in the mouthof the box they clapped shut but a rat can slipthrough a hole like a dimeand a TomContinue reading “Tubes”

my curse has always beento romanticise my lifewhen it didn’t deserve it that time we kissed in the rainI was an fleabite on your armthat you scratched when I turned away the Polaroid of us drinkingmulled wine in a cabinI looked at for a swollen momentthen threw out with the rest of it running shoelessContinue reading “Calcify”

we’re too alike, you and Inot by the filaments of a cellor by bone; your face is yoursand mine is paint and polymer before that I looked like my fatherso people said, a backhandwith a smile, although I was youfrom the brine of the afterbirthyour code pressed into the wrinklesof my brain like crisp ironingContinue reading “Next Of Kin”

It was Friday night when Lois found the hole. It had opened up in the flowerbed, where the cats had been buried, one after the other, where the summer blooms had been brown and wilted and dying. They were all gone now, having fallen into the black pit without a trace. It was as wideContinue reading “Gone Were The Flowers”

The snow lay heavy in the village, even thicker than it did back home in Boston; there was more of it every winter, it seemed. Tomo stood with his head craned back, watching the heavens fall. He wondered how long it would take for them to cover him completely if he lay down upon theContinue reading “Tomo’s Path”

I know how I’ll dress when you’re gone waist small as two fistslips laquered black,black as the pineI’ll rap with my knucklesto see you out, to see youspun into cinderson a loom at which Death toiledwith sympathetic fingersturning dustinto gold I know how I’ll stand meeting the shiftinggaze of any who thoughtI was a shadowfromContinue reading “A Funeral In Bangor”