dear creatures
i was in the bath reading a library book of adrienne rich poems (plastic cover buckling from steam) and watching my skin turn red (strange colours under smudging tattoos) and drinking cheap red wine (teeth filtering cork cos we had to bash it in with a screwdriver) while my girlfriend listened to her band's 4-track demo on repeat which i'd told her was like wanking in front of the mirror but it didn't matter cos all i could hear was the sirens echoing through the air conditioning vents.
and i was thinking about when we first got together, how i couldn't stop thinking about her hands (so small and always fidgeting, picking at the edges of the menu and twisting her rings and untying and retying her shoelaces), those nights when i told my friends i was going out for a smoke but went to the club where she worked and found her still hanging around even though she'd finished hours ago and she kissed me in the street (both of us rain-drenched and shivering in our t-shirts), and how i fell in love with her when she told me she collected fruit stickers in a little notebook because her uncle and grandpa did.
i must have dozed off cos the bathwater was goosebumping me and the skin on my soles felt too tight and the pages were glued mothwing-thin to my sternum when my girlfriend shouted baby come and see this so i climbed out and dripped onto the carpet while she held my pruned hand and we stood at the window and watched two girls kick the shit out of each other in the street three floors down. we stayed there for a long time until we heard the sirens echoing through the air conditioning vents.
Imaginary Birds
On the red-checked tablecloth in a clapboard house somewhere in the middle of your country: a china white saucer of butter and rye crackers, muddy lettuce, still-warm bread, a cluster of beers and some water that you’re sure is drinkable despite the reddish grit. Here you will eat and drink with your hands straight from containers, and with eating comes talking. You will make walls with words; you will build up this little cell.
Some of you will leave, break through the walls to build more in someone else’s country, uninvited and entirely necessary. You will bring tablets to make the water drinkable, pieces of printed paper to explain your theories; scrawl pictures in the dust when words become too heavy in the mouth. You will wipe soot from leaves, soak oil from birds. You will weave shelters from torn branches with ends still weeping sap. You will build things up for others to break down.
Some of you will stay, grow the walls and the people behind them. You will crowd around this thing you all made, this baby raised by committee. Some of you will forget, even just for a moment, whose belly she came from – who made her guts and voice, each toe and eyelash – and maybe in that moment you will even think that she is yours. You will smile to think that you made this tiny perfect object grasping her fists in the middle of the table – to think that you could create this from your body! And you will remember, after that moment, that you did not. All you made was this table, and this meal, and these walls, which after all are made of nothing but words.
Bio: Kirsty Logan is an MLitt student in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. Her writing is in print or upcoming in Word Riot, Polluto, Neon, Pank, Moondance, and others. She lives in Glasgow with her girlfriend and the rain.