Woe

these steps don't have a carpet,

loud when kissed by the bottom of so many shoes

it's bustling, but

nobody bursts through my bedroom door.

i won't be dragged down these stairs

by my hair, dislocating shoulders

hanging on to bannisters greyed with muck

from the palms of a man

who doesn't wash before touching my bare skin.

this house is a mercy

in my last thirteen houses i'd never have seen thirty,

but nobody hangs from a rope in this bathroom

i don't hold open wrists closed in these hallways and

nobody will touch me in this bed.

the air smells like books and carries the loudest voices i know but

these are gentle and do not critique me.

i won't feel walls or floors meet the back of my head in this house

this house is my home,

and this home is a mercy.

there's a lock on my door

where i'd stack books and bells on the floor by the hinges had this

been my fathers house,

but it's not.

The lock's unlatched and i'm unphased.

the sunlight wakes me, not bells or fists or fingers

in my vagina,

my overdosing mother,

a needle prick, scalpel blade, or naked adult man against the body of a younger me.

the sunlight wakes me,

and i've decided the sunlight is a mercy, now.

from every hole in your head

you can't move fast enough to catch them

all and cork the exit points

Feet wet with it. slick on your body

you don't need to think; you're sick of it.

Thoughts on the floor swimming like sperm

cells on the tiles. Call your mother. Call

your mother. Take it further - love your

father and all his flaws.

A constant stream of red stuff's gushing

out of every gunshot wound in my pelvis

and I can't move fast enough to forget

what once was. Feet wet. Slick on my

body. I can't think; l'm sick with it.

Blood in the bath like it was then. I call my

mother. I've seen her like this. I remember

my father and the blood he caused.

I've skipped over those news articles and had the phonecalls come through later. I think it won't be anyone I know until my voicemail floods with 'Have you heard?` and 'Call me back when you get this.' I'm too familiar with the feeling you get when it all clicks.

There's a magnet on the fridge with a friend's face on it - one of those themepark snapshots, and she looks so happy. It's always been there. Distance set in, and I looked at it all the time but never thought to text.

I let myself forget. She'd been gone a year before I found out she was dead. It's been years now and I still dont know how it happened. Too scared to ask, but really I already know. Those scars up her arms, how she lost her lover on the bridge. All things left out of a photograph.

My mother tried to tell me about a girl from my school and I ignored her. On my way out the door, putting on my shoes and brushing her off. She didn't have the words. I got the call later - she was my best friend and I cried for days. I remember bringing her home the first day we met. I remember our last conversation was an argument. The guilt of leaving it unresolved.

There was a text from a girl I'd loved most my life. I told her to keep going and woke up to the text from her mother telling me she's in a coma. She couldn't keep putting one foot infront of the other. The promise of tomorrow had always been too much for her.

I found out about another in the form of a memorial post on instagram. People saying their goodbyes to a woman I'd left on delivered for two months. I read the message over and over, trying to catch my breath.

and mother it seems a joke that my childhood was spent escaping death

and my teen years were spent chasing it when my adulthood would be spent dying just as I had chosen to live

and mother every day i spend afraid of every man l ever loved

because every man's requital was at best a hole in the drywall

of one of many childhood bedrooms

and mother, you told me l must choose life, that if there's no space in my heart i must make room

but my heart is full to bursting of love for a boy who would see me drown

in the blood he made me bleed before he apologised for hurting me

mother, my heart is full to bursting, and the palpitations that prove it

make this feel like the end of the line

because, mother, my father doesn't want me here and you watched me

burn our house down to avoid admitting you made it less than a home

because, mother, i am afraid of every man I ever loved, and every man

I could stay where I was, not knowing where I was going to be day to day, or I could go back home. Not home as in, to my mother, or home as in to my house or to my lover. But home to the city I was in last time I found myself stood making choices at the tracks. Home as in, the place I'd spent the most of time, even if it was the worst of time.

I avoid this place, with its faces and awkward greetings and 'where've you been?'s. There are too many apologies here. Too many men and their hands. I can spot them a mile off; I still remember how they smell. I still remember what they said to me, just fifteen and out after dark. They'd keep me warm, then. They'd keep me warm now, too, given the chance.

I begin to remember why I left this place. The doctor at the walk-in centre asks me how many times it's been this month - tells me it's not uncommon for women on the streets. I say, 'or off them'. She nods. Congratulates me for staying clean, staying fed, staying warm. Congratulates me for not killing myself. Asks me not to.

'You've made it too far, now.' and she's right, this doctor. She puts it all funny and wrong, but she's right. All I can do is live, even if it's cold, even with a bag of my stuff on the pavement as a chair. Even when I collapse in the hotel lobby, or outside the spar, or at my mother's front door, all I can do is live. Before I sleep, I feel their hands where they were, all at once, and I live. I've made it too far now.

She tells me that my mother failed me. I know that. God, I know that. I was the first to fucking know that. I smile and nod. She tells me my kidneys are fine this time. She tells me it's dangerous for me here. I know that, too.

This, though, is as home as it gets. I wonder some days if I made the wrong choice at the tracks

- woe

see a younger me in each

screaming child at the palm end of a smack and

each girl giving up her sex for

the burns from the crack.

I shed more teeth in my dreams

than in life, but it's still real.

The ones I lost, I still feel.

Mother, I see myself in this girl

whose parents didn't let her come back home

at the end of the world.

She's dead now.

It's been a year

and mother I still haven't found someone

can say I love and mean it.

My god, she was fearless

The woman on the street corner is a mirror.

In each makeshift bed

at the end of the night l'm with her.

ask me how l'm still here and

I'Il tell you how I don't know,

when each of us are each other

and each season is the winter.

Stark, bare, and cold on my skin.

It's dark here

In the refuge,

In the shelter, the hospital, the foster home,

where we're kin.

Those women and me, we're all the same thing.

- woe

A girlfriend is a wife.

His tongue in your mouth is a demand for something more.

Stay as long as you need.

Means he'll watch you as you bleed out on the floor.

A body is a weapon, riot,

Currency, or curse

Stay with what you know and love,

Or leave.

I can't say which one is worse.

A girlfriend is a mother you can fuck

Or smack or kill.

You think you know each other and

You think you know the deal

But a boyfriend is a threat

And I will die on that damn hill.

What men know is Coerce, and

'I like you in your short skirts.'

Stay stuck with what you know and love

Or leave -

Even when it hurts.

- woe

24.09.24

I stand undressed in front of the mirror in my mother's bathroom, counting scars, recounting memories. I haven't been here in a long time. She's put the photographs of me as a child on the wall by the stairs. I can't stand to let her go, though I know her grip on [me] is slack. I keep coming back here, like she'l love me differently this time. Most of these scars are her fault if I think about it for long enough.

I am not entitled to her, she says. I am not entitled to know about the things she did, or the things she didn't do. The things that led to me being a pale thing almost dead, with paler lines through it.

I touch the scars on the inside of my arm where the needles went in. Over, and over. I run fingertips over the scars on my feet, from running away barefoot. I picked the grit out with tweezers - still feel it, if I try. Still feel it if I don't, sometimes. The ones on my thighs; my own doing, but everything I know about mutilation, I learned from my mother. My kidneys, my bladder, from the vices I chose, to sit rigid through the fathers she chose,

coming

and going.

I'd kill half of them, given the chance, watch the bodies burn, cut my lunch up with the same knife, and swallow like they told me to. A mark runs down my spine, where my father dropped me. It bled, but I barely see it now. There's scars on my face, from the fists and the rounders bat. My hands, from the burn, the grip, the glass, the getaway. I touch them all.

I know i could not be the next of us

to snap and kill a man

because i can't make my body anything

other than limp.

my cheeks are flushed,

red as the blood,

as warm as it was,

soaking into the white of my pillow

or pooling on the lino

Not spilled milk or a dropped spoon or a missed train, but rape and beatings and blood and overdose and drowning. All the worst things to have happened to my body. I cried about the men I'd known all my life and how it felt to realise they were hurting me. It is terrifying that we can never fully know anybody.

But what do we do with that - never trust anybody again? I start to spiral from time to time, convincing myself I shouldn't let this new guy take me by the hand or touch my waist, in case he decides to finish what my fathers started and kill me dead. I like to think I know him. I like to think he wouldn't. It's just that it's a fact that I will never really, truly know. I never thought any of those men were going to hurt me like they did. Do you never trust again?

Living within the presence of men is to submit to the threat of death. They could rape me. They have. They could kill me. They've tried.

I look at photographs of me as a child before and after the most impactful traumas, and know I will never be the person in the 'before' photograph ever again. In the moment of that trauma she and I were split from each other and I am somebody different now, while she will always be that same person. When I look at the pictures I am so sure that I was never this child and that I have only existed since the moment those men laid their hands on me. I have never been without the friction burn of trying to wash the touch of those men from my skin.

I'm afraid that they are the largest defining part of me.

- woe

I am a body made up of the excuses my mother gave

for a man who'll never pay.

He left me thirsty enough I drank my own tears;

so hungry I killed and ate my own fears.

and faced new ones much later.

Fate is that I will kill him,

so long as I don't kill me first.

A softer man kisses off my lipstick

at the dive bar -

he's something I'm afraid of.

There's parts I keep hidden

parts that I'm ashamed of.

The things l'm made of are

reservoir water and other men's pricks.

I regret each pound of flesh

and every me that hasn't happened yet.

Know that I am not a dream.

Know that the worst of me can't be

washed out like dirt between toes.

Destiny is in my hands around his throat.

it's over when I am

everything he made of me.

- woe

all the whizz in the world couldn't do this to me.

with her head on my chest

i'm cautious

every breath is for her.

my fingers comb her hair, softly

she stiffens, reaches for the bucket,

she's nauseous,

blood marbles in her vomit.

my darling, my love -

there's blood on the rug;

i'll chuck it.

i wipe bile and tears from her chin,

lay her down as she laid me:

with tenderness.

my scars, her scars, the same.

i'll have to change these sheets again

burning up, she tells me this won't change

i nod

that i know

we won't win, we can't win.

But we're here now, and we'll see it through.

- woe

i read 'The body of a man' on the news and

thought -

he was a boy. he was a boy. he was a child, just now. there's no going back, no reversal as the rot sets into the body of a man, and the regret sets into mine. i let him down. his father and his stab wounds let him down. his mother and her soft voice let him down.

we let them down. all the children poking holes in each other. we let them all down and we will let them down again.

- woe

I might let you undress me before the sunrise

We're already here, in the heat.

I suck on your fingers,

You taste like cigarettes

And wild thyme.

Good enough to eat.

Covered in fresh cuts and new bruises

I bathe in all this salt and lime.

It hurts like I want it to.

I watch myself fall out of me.

I've missed it like I miss dying.

Pain is a comfort, like fresh sheets.

l am more than what I have allowed myself to be.

Down on two scraped knees

Begging: please,

Let me bleed. Let me unwind.

Hurt me. Touch me softly.

Tell me l'm something more than my heartbeat.

Fuck me in the backseat.

Water me like l'm a half-dead rose

you're not ready to compost.

Eat me like I'm sweet,

Like you love me,

Like you've killed me for my meat.

Keep me as a secret, as a crime,

I don't mind.

some old messy watercolour self-portraits from around 2021-2023

3, 4, 5,6,8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19,21

What were you wearing?

Pyjamas. A dress. A onesie. Tights. Ripped jeans. Jeans that he ripped. Fishnets. A beret. A miniskirt. My underwear. A t-shirt. Nothing at all.

Did you know him?

Yes. No.

What were you doing?

Dancing. Sleeping. Pretending to sleep. Walking. Screaming. Sitting down. Smoking. Drinking. Watching TV. Tidying my room. Washing dishes. Praying.

Were you intoxicated?

Yes. No.

Did you try to make him stop?

I didn't. I did. I screamed. I asked him nicely. I poured my drink over him. I bottled him. I played dead. I pissed myself. I stabbed him. I said please. I tried to run. I smacked him. I explained why it was wrong. I told him I was fifteen.

And did he stop?

No.

Did he tell you why?