C+nto: & Othered Poems

by Joelle Taylor

we have regressed as a community. Our meeting places, clubs and bars have closed, and we gather in distinct flocks across social media, each flock speaking a different language. We inhabit separate rooms in the same club. If we were to regain the real-life meeting grounds, if we were to be in the same room, then perhaps we would remember our commonality. The internet celebrates difference. The club celebrates unity. In these distinct spaces we learn to protect one another. We learn that we are one another.

It is against this backdrop of rising global homophobia, transphobia and misogyny that this book is written. I wanted to both acknowledge the crimes against the LGBT community and reflect back to a time when we had a greater sense of unity, of self.

winding the words in; maybe the skin knows something about silence, see how it has turned

We fall to our knees, as we always have, bring the bones a well-cooked meal. Light gossips the glass & dust rises like heretic prayer.

your trench is crowded with dead women wearing faces that try to escape them the clothes of someone you once knew there are landmines buried deep beneath your skin & no one understands them tread softly when you walk across me in between battle cry & bedroom is this sticky quiet this no man’s land.

all these lifetimes searching for body.

you don’t wear make-up to prove you have not made anything up this is your face

you are a chip off the mountain and you join an avalanche of wrong-walking women shaven heads like tumbling rocks you keep them close they are rosary

we are untamed a wilderness of women we are waste ground what a waste love nothing grows on us sterile and barren an un-useful female empty as church pews the wind rattles its fists inside our wombs

come now, snake boy come now, heretic healer where are the maths that solve us? How do we fit into your algebra your binary code?

is it that a woman without make up is a woman without a face? // how were we to know that when we were cleansing we were erasing our whole existence.

you are a trespasser in your own body the landowners are men who pass you in the street. // & now Accrington city centre cars stammer & words ejaculate from slit windows your mother’s phone wails song of insistence the umbilical cigarette woman who taught me to breathe

men cradle their fists like babies watch as you walk past as though they are thin ribbed cats in the undergrowth & you a small shaven-headed bird there is a reason that women are likened to birds & it has little to do with wings some songs harden on the wind some girls live in gilded cages on suburban mantelpieces.

hammering the last nails into the coffin of the old gods strangers hug & tell each other secrets you are ecstatic but then the light looks away

when you come around you are empty & his eyes are full & above you twin gods & he slips into small boy sleep thumb slotted in jukebox mouth & this is the first time you think you are going to be killed & when you are not it is a disappointment the morning after pill is a communion wafer & you are forgiven your trespasses.

men are broken things breaking things.

we are ferocious women eating our children our youth climbing out of our skins & leaving them draped like soiled wedding dresses as we fall into each other’s mouths this is love furious love.

not one of my friends was allowed to live in her body unaccompanied. always a lodger pacing in the box room always a landlord collecting rent.

no one will remember the love how alike it is to rage how screams made corporeal are rainbows how rainbows became corporate logos how we carved our epitaphs into a stone wall no one will remember // unpicking acronyms by candlelight.

we dress as our greatest fears / we dress as ourselves / o Maryville / the etymology of dyke / so many holes to fill /

let us walk alone at night / & let the night not follow us / let us drink too much / & awaken in each other’s mouths

let someone take a photograph not of us / but because of us / let our limbs grow wild / our hair retreat / our hormonal seas / let our breasts // let them // let us inherit each other’s teeth / o Maryville / keep us alive this death / keep us from prayer / deliver us from ego / for thine are the body / the birthing & the burning / forever & ever // are you a man?

each with its own customs but we share a root language a lesbian walks into a bar or a bar walks into a lesbian how it is to arrive what it is to become o holy i stand at the bar side knowing when i look up i will be serving myself & when i am done that i will take the drinks to a table where i am waiting

i know why we are drawn to the corners it’s where the road cannot reach us. Every part of a woman is a weapon if you know how to hold it

at the centre of every boi / is a bare room / & inside a swinging lightbulb / a wire thin girl dances / stays with you even when you look away / angels don’t fall from Heaven / they leave at closing time / unscrew their fucks in the backs of black cabs / abandon their bodies /

how we were beside each suit hangs a boy she once loved a blue twill cadet a well-spoken rent boy the pelt of a father

when she walks past / more comfortable / in their illusion / the wallpaper / wants to undress / & the ribald carpet / soft as any onenight / has learned the beauty of submission.

mouths are amphitheatres. At the end of the evening a skirt parachutes her to safety.

they found your clothes but not your body

when they search her their hands are the first men to enter the village guns cocked some wild reckoning doing it for the kids they are looking for where the rebels are hiding the enclave the poem returning to the hand a tight-lipped press radio humming the wall they are looking for the girl who hides all the girls the one who turned the rainbow into a railway track but the villagers keep building more houses to search & the woman is always one street ahead her heels tap a telegram answered by outlaws & when they arrive it is in the nick of time an ankle disappearing into a helicopter that’s the problem with women like this they say as soon as you find her she is gone it’s like holding a hole.

when they search her they are showing her her own body

They stand at the sinks letting the taps talk while their eyes find each other in the mirror. It is always this way.

/ I was a girl who had grabbed her body / from the wrong coat hook /

I cut my profile / from a pattern in NME / but the seams still show / white lines in the school disco.

bad girls gather like cigarette smoke / their night talk / swarming / above the heads of binary dancers / the lit ends of their cigarettes / winking / tinker taylor hello sailor / an insolence of leather jackets / the warm outrage of indifference / kiss me until my mouth opens into a career / darling, you / bad grammar grin / shark fin Mohican / swim across the dance floor to me / tinker taylor hello sailor / my gender / is exile.

we know each other / have inherited the same tradition of longing / a language of full stops / we speak most clearly / when we are not speaking

have always found each other / bin detritus / underage thinker / wrong walking woman / you must be homosapien too.

violence is a girl backed up against herself everything about her ghost everything bed. when I leave home, it follows me.

i rent a separate flat for my body to live in while I write myself into the world feeding thin slithers of raw promises to the empty mouths of purses

Unbelong I am my mother in my father’s suit still the girl with the face of a man still wrong walking.

knows the way out of her body is not the way out

young things eddy & glamour / are paintings of themselves / & old Jack Catch / straightens the crease in her houndstooth / says / jesus / are all women female impersonators / says / everything is running back inside / there are new words for words / & surveying the club / mutters / I remember

their pockets plump with misgiving

when you sleep, you dream of men standing still. there is a lock & the lock is also the key & what you need to do is turn yourself.

The hair falls like binary code and where it lands a forest grows and the forest is full of wild and the wild is full of apology and the apology is full of tiger and one of them jumps up at the stud in the chair and eats her, head-first.

but still the bar knows what it knows that a tongue is a bed & this boi understands how to make it, origami the sheets into something

a mirror full of starting lines knowing that at any moment we were going to begin. but the floor kept falling to the sky. but we kept forgetting our lines.

many bois are lost in them those rip tides of sudden belief the undercurrent of language she speaks dangerous dance the eros of survival too close together

we have saved / each other’s lives so many times / she says to the bois / we have become lighthouses / sweeping the dark gossiping seas / the crowded head bobbing under / all our girls / adrift on the dance floor / we have pulled each other / out of the wreckage of our own bodies / sat beside each other / straight backed / making islands of each other’s bruises / promising that one day / we would live there /

see how the girl is almost a girl see the bois grow out from their wounds head first when the trapeze artist loses her grip on the narrative the townsfolk watch silently as she tumbles to a dust that they draw a Venn diagram of a wound & an exit in when the ambulance comes it flashes a bright blue gash & its gaudy o is a pinhole in a door you can see the future through the hole in a girl the doctor says & the boi leans over sees herself step out from the wound whose edges applaud in red velvet grief sees herself wear her wound as a cape, as a caul that she raises as one of her own dresses in schoolboy suits well well well the doctor smiles it must be true what does not kill you makes you make you.