violence

• A relief in the shape of a wreath, and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in the face where the eye has been taken out
• It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.
• A Sister, dipped in blood
• The daffodils are now fading and the tulips are opening their cups, spilling out colour. The tulips are red, a darker crimson towards the stem, as of they have been cut and are beginning to heal there
• fumbling in her robe, for her pass, and they thought she was hunting for a bomb
• Now that she’s the carrier of life, she is closer to death
• It makes the men look like dolls on which faces have not yet been painted; like scarecrows… the heads are zeros
• Their faces were happy, ecstatic almost. Fire can do that
• Give me children or else I die. There’s more than one meaning to it.
• There were cuttings, drownings. Before they got all the bugs ironed out.
• What he is fucking is the lower half of my body
• dirty as an oil beach, sure death to shore birds
• I feel as if my feet in their flat red shoes aren’t quite touching the floor
• I think about the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands
• so female in shape it was a surprise they’d not long since been rooted out
• It’s you and me up against the wall, baby
• I won’t go into what happened after that. I’d rather not talk about it. All I can say is that they didn’t leave any marks
• I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it
• [the bodies are] like birds with their wings clipped, like flightless birds, wrecked angels
• It’s a mistake to hang back to obviously in a group like this; it stamps you as lukewarm, lacking in zeal.
• He has become an it