Nothing could prepare me for the charcoal sculptures of incinerated trees, miles and miles of them in the most beautiful place I’ve been. Banff to Jasper goes from green to deep crimson, emeralds and golds, glacial crowns atop wet red earth splattered with quartz. Knowing is one thing. We drove the split between two graveyards expanding beyond the horizon. The wounds, gigantic. All colours collapsed into black. She consoled me with a poem.

Deep along the creek with not another soul for miles we stumbled upon bear scat glittering with the remnants of berries like the night’s sky. My lover was excited, we might finally see one. But we saw no bear. We were stopped in our tracks by an inimitable sound from the thickets. I had never heard wolves. One, two, three, more. A chorus. One maybe wailing in pain, in an act of violence or hunger. They were closing distance. My body erupted in excitement and terror. Heart beating, a useless sweat. A very old memory. The terrible intensity of closeness/distance that marks this—

This was soon beaten out of me. So was my ease of learning and my contact with the spirit world. Violence left me mute, bullying with a stutter; schooling taught me I was stupid; coming of age eroded my nature and left me so distressed by my own consciousness that for years I sought oblivion, enacting the violence that had been done to me, onto myself.

In a sense, this is a universal story.

The first time I took psilocybin, I remembered for a moment, and collapsed in tears. Then I kept forgetting. I believe we all know something of where we come from when we are born. You can see it in the eyes of babies, wide like saucers, in a state of cosmic awe, no separation between self and other. Yet to be divided by language (Lacan), in a schizoid state of fusion with the primary object (Klein), confronted by an engulfing world of untethered objects, yet to be signified (Merleau-Ponty). How do we know how to breathe the moment we leave the water? Truth is a matter of unknowing.

(Written in 2018)

You are your father’s daughter

She said

In an act of violence echoing his

It succeeded in stitching his name to my collar

Like the time I got a second-hand school shirt

And spent a summer sitting in class in another girl’s life

This skin isn’t mine

It is a spy which sends her signals I can’t detect

Because I wouldn’t recognise him

But I wear his face all the same

Carrion

(Written during a lockdown in Canterbury, 2021)

Will they even believe me, forty years from now,

if I say I slunk the citadel walls in a plague mask,

While all around an empire fell?

I longed for silence and I got it;

The subordinated beauty of England, ravaged by rain.

The land of Robin Hood,

of pagan woods and crows in miles of wheat fields

Oblivious to mute villages.

Mouths masked,

Stone walls peeling and books bleached in dusty windows.

I wished for the city to be gagged,

its eyes plucked out and I got it.

Carrion lies on roads built for horses,

carrying one dead moment into the next,

the summer rain a reminder, the silence carving space

To account for this sacrifice.

This is what they mean by silence is deafening,

its demand rattling my bones.

It brought home a murder

and it wants me to thank it.

From Chiapas, Mexico, 2021

Ella ama la forma

el toma lo salvaje a la cama;

Ella, el, y la tierra.

Barro en sus botas

y su corazón cruzado.

En la puerta

Dije la última palabra

En la ventana

La cara ya es un fantasma

You ask how to be sure I’m alive

Isn’t it clear

from the creaks in my joints,

the crease of my skin,

the way the earth quakes

in response to my voice?

Just For Winter (2021)

She said she didn’t believe in money

but she rearranged my internal organs

and sold them back to me at a higher price.

I knew she was a swindler

but snake oil makes good sport of the famished.

She liked to make an entrance through the chest

and out through the gut

Holding promises in a graveyard smile

which piled high til they threatened her posture.

Can’t be forgotten when you’re always just departing

So she never occupied the same space for long.

I still find her scent sealed in mine.

She liked to be loved by dinner

by breakfast eulogised

As if afraid of crows feet,

as if running away from time.

After Winter (2021)

Tread softly said her skin

Which while it’s endured time

Feels it will fall away from the weight of words

Which land like weapons to a woman who allows her wounds to show

A ruby découpage for your pleasure

Just one breath

That’s all it took to defrost her

In the moments escaping sleep she forgets she sleeps alone

And spends each day arranging the furniture into a funeral pyre

For momentary lapse in reason

She hangs brightly

From the periphery each time I am touched

Because sex is an exercise in undoing

And she the sinew which grows over the stitch

I’ve never experienced such turgid paranoia in my quiet middle-class neighbourhood before. No one was ‘observing social distance,’ but the term has already embedded itself into our lexicon. The supermarket was heaving, however, at 8 a.m., people shuffling about, frantically loading baskets on impulse. It had never been so busy and so quiet at once. A dozen downcast eyes, all avoiding one another, lips behind masks observing silence, which was only broken to mumble in quintessential British derision at the man fingering all the fruit. He didn’t give a damn. It was as if he’d burst in and done a shit in the lettuces. The village had turned on him, this tall, blond man who looked like he’d never left Hampstead. It was as if all the revulsion they usually reserved for the homeless or the foreign was suddenly turned inward, against their own. Their avoidance of him, this vector of filth and death, made me panic. Suddenly every inch of me was hyper-vigilant of the proximity of other bodies, any one of which could be carrying. How you long for it to make itself visible, so you can know. I hurriedly grabbed what little food there was left and found myself hyperventilating, already exhausted at the idea of having to disinfect everything on returning home.

I grew up on science fiction which always hoped that an alien threat would have the silver lining of unifying the species. It’s what Bush and Blair echoed when they claimed the world was at war with terror, the absurdity of the statement only to be revealed when domestic terror attacks proved to be the biggest threat to peace. The alien invasion is here, but it is firmly embedded in us. While the US and China are busy reviving a Cold War blame game, we should be vigilant, not just of our physical health, but of the psychosocial effects of internalising a hostile alien invader, in both real and imaginary ways. Covid-19 will not be the great equaliser optimists anticipate; it is, however, the absolute manifestation of Capital in its death drive. It is the endpoint of the force which atomises us absolutely. It has the power to reduce us to paranoid, obsessive-compulsive consumer-drones whose only purpose is to survive in service of The Economy. We must get through this, for now, but then we must reinvent a reason to live. Over the next (take a guess), we will have been unsocialised to a degree unprecedented for a culture so meshed in excess and instant gratification, it is going to be frightening. It is also going to be fertile ground for inventing entirely new ways of being with one another. Lest we forget how to assemble.

It’s been a long time since I did any film theory but Laura Mulvey in Death 24X a Second makes the case for the artistry of 35mm film having something to do with the slightly suspended temporality of its frame rate - it lags just behind the processing speed of the human eye. We see a sequence of still images in quick succession. A representation is suspended ever so slightly; it has us slip out of time. This differs from contemporary cinematic experience, which, in its aggressive preoccupation with realism and immersion, merely reproduces reality and multiplies its size, removing its depth. Nothing is sacred in a culture which assumes that all innovation is progress.

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“I understand what happened. We trauma-bonded.” This is what my ex-girlfriend says to me when we meet for the first time since we left each other in a maelstrom. No contact. Just small discoveries of her belongings stowed away with mine for weeks after, on account of sharing identical dress sizes.

I am furious. She has taken our story and neutered it. I suppose it must be useful to her, but it’s dead on its feet, completely lacking colour. I tell her “Maybe you trauma-bonded. I fell in love with you.” I omit that it was wild and beautiful and tragic. That we took road trips through small apocalypses. That we failed to separate our work lives from our lives. That she let me down repeatedly and when I fell apart, my brother said he suspects she’s not gay, but I don’t think it’s that simple. She is so busy being everyone else’s object of desire, she hasn’t gotten around to working out what hers is.

Since we’re learning how to be friends, she tells me about a new paramour. “You know,” she says, “it’s your typical meeting of AFAB fem-bods!” I know what she’s saying but I don’t know what she means and, to the strangers at surrounding tables, we must sound like members of a cult, or like the men who speak loudly into their earpieces in corporate acronyms while queuing for coffee, indistinguishable from well-dressed schizophrenics. I consider the assonance of fem-bod (fem-bot), and I think we needn’t have had centuries of feminism just to arrive at the conclusion that Woman is an object.

She had been romantically entangled with a man for some time. A man I introduced her to. Actually, the man had been my friend. Time has passed and I forgive her parts of the betrayal because even betrayal has parts that move. Some months into their relationship, his charming smile revealed sharp teeth. She lists his crimes, but she didn’t leave. Instead, she mutilated the outward signs of her femininity with an electric razor and some surgery. Cutting off her nose to spite her face. She always was a literal person.

How intriguing this is, that women with all the freedom afforded them by liberal democracy and the apparently abundant choice of the free market should choose to remain yoked to men they resent, and apathetically identify as hetero-pessimistic. How curious that a queer woman would sooner wage war on her own femininity rather than the man she feels oppressed by.

I wonder about sex and gender and their frailty, how little of it we can really be in possession of, and my questions are foreclosed before I can utter them, as she concludes in a lyrical tone, “hey – gender dysphoria!” Her vocabulary has mutated during our estrangement. The words are concrete but there is such uncertainty in their delivery, a measure of irony there intended to defend her from wondering how useful they are. Because they are bloody gauze. Some language is meant to account for complexity; hers reduces it. The language we have for this fragile thing we call identity is only ever good to cauterize a primal wound, so that we don’t suffer sepsis while we go on living.

Artemis, likely a goddess of untamed women and wild land, is re-written in the Hellenic world as a deity of virginity who punishes transgression. Numerous female deities are stripped of power in this way and reinscribed into patriarchal law, others sentenced to eternity of sexual slavery.

Freud’s home was littered with paraphernalia of Greek myths. Millennia of stories of men murdering and erasing women to maintain the myth that they birthed the world, and he put all that envy into us. Evidence for penis envy was never required. Of course women want what men have, what to their memory they have never had: the power, freedom afforded to men. Envy explained female dissatisfaction. No need to explain the worldwide oppression of women; it is what happens when the land is tamed, when order is restored to the cosmos.

Her uniquely obdurate feminism didn’t allow for the possibility that she had internalised a misogynistic myth. It is patriarchy, of course, that doesn’t believe in lesbians. And it might be forgiven through the existence of films like Drive Away Dolls and Honey Don’t!, part of the underwhelming and offensive “lesbian trilogy” by married couple Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke. In both films Margaret Qualley plays less of a lesbian and more a stand-in for a man, an avatar for male viewers. The notable difference between the two is her body, otherwise she is film noir-coded, smoking and intimacy-phobic, constantly objectifying women, and every single sex scene is centred around the phallus. These scenes suggest that lesbian sex is just a simulation of heterosexual sex, a fantasy maintained by the porn industry. The expert on lesbian affairs for this trilogy is Tricia Cooke herself, who identified as a lesbian until she met and married Ethan, and it is a shame that in 2025 this is the lesbianism that gets a mainstream audience.

We are so far from the radical work of Barbara Hammer, Cheryl Dunye and Yvonne Rainer, none of whom could have dreamed of a mainstream audience, but that was the 1980s. Where did the Lesbian go? Except for the occasional period drama, she ceased to exist. For as long as the imaginary is patriarchal, it cannot conceive of an erotic that isn’t phallic in form or content: in which one is either acting or acted upon.

Exchange between men is sealed by the gift of a virgin. And the rite of breaking and entering, of raping and stealing the hymen, represents a denial of what was always already offered: exchange within woman and between women. A commerce without an object, without salesmen, without a society or an established order, which is denied in the setting up of the fetish and of currency. But, without the prerequisite openness, without those lips always leaving a passage from inside to outside, from outside to inside, and staying in between as well, the place of exchange would not be secure. It is the closed-open lips of the woman which make it practicable for them.

Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions

There is a shot I love in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a tableaux of the three women doing their various labours. The artist, the noblewoman and her maid are left alone in the house and with them the men take their system of power. The women settle into something egalitarian. One says, “Equality feels nice.”

This is not to romanticise lesbianism. The same girlfriend who told me lesbian love is impossible went on to prove it to me in praxis. Women can be a lot like men. But we needn’t be, and that’s the point. We are limited by our imaginations, and if cinema is a barometer for the imaginary, then I believe these are cynical times in which, if the lesbian exists, she is merely a woman, with a strap-on, who thinks and relates like a man.

I am transformed into mud m/y legs m/y sex m/y thighs m/y belly standing between your legs glutted with the smell of the vaginal secretion rising from your middle, I liquefy within and without. The mud reaches the muscles of m/y thighs, it touches m/y sex, it coats m/e cold and slippery, m/y labia retracting it spreads to m/y abdomen m/y kidneys m/y shoulderblades the nape of m/y neck which is circumvented in its turn, m/y neck bows, you still holding m/y cheeks in your hands filling m/e with saliva and earth your tongue against m/y gums. M/y muscles separate from each other in sodden masses. M/y entire body is overwhelmed. First to fall is m/y anus. Some glutei soon follow. M/y biceps abandon m/y arms. The arms themselves fall entire to the ground. Only m/y cheeks remain intact. A very strong smell of moist earth spreads around. I see plants rooted in the fibres of m/y muscles. I lose heart, I submit m/yself to your will m/y deplorable one I have no share in this systematic transformation you impose on m/e.

Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body

...the past is an arid landscape filled with a vegetating imagination; that secularisation of the ideal.

Some more dense and abstract…

If I could trace a single line below the surface of my assumptions, would there come a point when clarity supersedes the chaos of what has been? The tragic sense of destiny is inherent in every man; but I defy fate, I alone am responsible for every action, every scene; in my nothingness I will create the idea, I shall see what I have imagined, and from that alone will spring my entire actions.

Berg arrives in a seaside town which is undoubtedly Brighton, intending to kill his father. The story is obviously Oedipal. It's also one of the strangest books I've read since Anna Kavan's Ice. Also resists marketable definitions, also possesses an uncanny horror. Berg is monstrous and absurdly funny, and suggests that Ann Quin understood principles of cinema (Psycho had been released four years before and I'm certain was inspiring) as much as Shakespeare: he'll never be back, because he's full fathoms five, she writes, anticipating the day she would walk into the sea.

The horrifying events of Berg move at the pace of a thriller, but both Berg and the narrator regularly grow distracted (often the effects of intoxication), ruminating on life, death and evil; a poetic fascination with details of a setting that becomes more alive, hostile and psychedelic the further Berg spirals into paranoia and confusion. Branches like charred limbs I will remember, and the stirring of the insect between throat and heart. Is the insect here merely anxiety? Berg unravels and creatures begin appearing throughout the prose, what was buried appears to have been dug up, what was believed to be dead has disappeared. Biography comes in epistolary form, glimpses of childhood in beautiful dreamy vignettes, spiked with witticisms (the kind that working class writers do best)…

Hills meeting sky, and those who charmed paths with snails, or put Catherine wheels in hedges; rockets misfired from other planets; the whole galaxy: a giant's chair, oneself a splinter in the leg. Daisy-chained to the girl next door, and envious of those who held between their legs a bigger daffodilly than your own.

Then there's this stream-of-consciousness…

Through space, suspended almost, then the shock of meeting the ground. Let it just be like this for an eternity, like before waking up properly, or could it be before birth, half in, half out? They said my head was in the wrong position. She must have conceived on her side. Perhaps I liked it that way, maybe that's the cause of my never really finishing anything? Maybe women felt like this after being made love to? What could it be like having heavy pendulous pears strung practically round one's neck, a triangular fur piece, blood every lunar month? Edith? A part of her, he would never know, a consciousness undeclared, a bride hardly virginal that vamped your dreams, a cry in the dark, clutching bouquets through the night's half orgies, a hand groping for the light switch, staring into the mirror after midnight, the hangman's steady gaze at the empty bed, the familiar furniture and objects scattered about the room, yet no longer belonging. The noises behind walls, the faint tapping – convicts sending out signals to the distressed. Murder they whispered to your heart's ease, and you shouting for attention. Edith entering. Her eyes half-closed, listening to a sphinx's secret, hiding under the pyramidal palaces of her flesh, no answer to your insistence.

When I was an undergrad I was taught a seminar on modernist literature and Virginia Woolf was the only woman on the reading list. I think this goes a way to explaining why Ann Quin isn't better known than she is. And why Clarice Lispector is remembered as beautiful moreso than she is a genius on par with Kafka. Ann Quin wrote four novels, travelled widely and honed her craft with American experimental writers of the fifties and sixties but I suspect she never became one of them. She makes fun of the Beat poets in Tripticks. She was clearly fiercely intelligent, and unhappy. She killed herself at thirty-seven. Jennifer Hodgson recently journeyed to collect her unpublished stories from Quin's former lovers and friends, which live on here.

In the jungle in Cuc Phuong, an enormous banana tree was split at its base, lying flat on the ground. "That was an elephant," Phuong said. He was named after Vietnam's largest national reserve because he was born there. He just glanced at it and knew. Phuong is Kinh, indigenous to the region. His father had been Vietkong and had taught him all he needed to survive the jungle when Phuong was a child. During the war, when the American forces were destroying the Northern Highlands, people fled south only to be bombed on the roads in pursuit. Phuong's father fled the country, hiked through Cambodia and Laos over thirteen days by foot, becoming radicalised, and joined the resistance in the South. He watched all his friends die.

Ninh Binh is a region where farmers once took up arms, now everyone is working in the booming tourism industry. Phuong told me he was shocked when his father seemed happy to smile at the new waves of American tourists. I gathered he was at least, this time, greeting them on his own terms.

Phuong taught me how to find clean drinking water from banana trees and how to defend myself against a cobra. He developed his English listening to BBC podcasts. He spoke well but struggled to understand me so I asked him questions and kept my own answers short. I asked him and our driver if people here still believe in communism. Our driver, around 20 years old, was a patriot. Phuong, 40 years old, said the older you get, the more you see and the less you believe. His main income is rice farming. After 50 years of working the land, the government will buy it from him and his wife for about 5000 American dollars, redivide it and distribute it. Like in capitalist countries, trails of money in Vietnam disappear. I asked them about healthcare and the answers were unclear. The young patriot said everyone gets free preventative check-ups, and I wondered about all the people in Hanoi pushing bicycles with mangled limbs.

"People think I'm crazy," Phuong said, "because I have three bins at home." Ninh Binh is developing rapidly. Everyone I spoke to about this told me with a friendly veneer that it has lifted people out of poverty, but construction sounds everywhere, luxury accommodations springing up uncomfortably alongside rice paddies and the delicate veins of rivers. I have seen too much of this destroy parts of Mexico, the spirit of places like Puerto Escondido exorcised for concrete condos. Phuong told me the government doesn't care about the environment. Each day the sun sinks, dust in the air is replaced with the stench of burning trash. Partly, he says, this is because the collectors just don't come to all these tiny villages, partly it's habit. It's also a habit of Vietnamese Buddhists to burn enormous offerings to the dead. The smell hovers over every cemetery and in every shrine, hundreds of them dotted everywhere you roam. Phuong is not religious, he thinks religion keeps people stupid and controlled. If you are Christian and work in the public sector, he told me, you don't get a promotion.

I look for God in all these sacred spaces and what I find is cash, cookies and stacks of plastic water bottles. Phuong tells me about the three colours for Gaia, Mother Earth, the Spirit of all things. That's the only God the Kinh people worship, and it's not idolatry. God breathes in the trees ripped apart by typhoons. I realise I saw Her in the form of three large deities dressed in red, white and green inside a shrine on a tiny island in the centre of Trang An.

Cuc Phuong was once the home of the Muong people. In the 1960s they discovered a cave containing 7000-year old human remains, tools and the discarded shells of mountain snails. The government kicked them out to the edge of the jungle, set up the National Park, and prohibited the Muong people from living on or working their own land. Phuong and I passed a small Muong tomb, abandoned since wartime. You can visit their villages, 17km away from where we hiked, with a guide and they accommodate you for the night. I tried to imagine them smiling at tourists, or anyone else.

We hiked 7km past the prehistoric sites, where the jungle was so thick and so high, the moisture in the air made it cold to the touch, and some hours in, I realised I was seeing shades of green with a clarity that developed over time. What are the eyes of a person born and raised in the jungle? What audacity, to think American or French soldiers could dominate this wild land, where ragged black rock towers everywhere and plants can kill you in seven steps.

"See the Killing Tree?"

I did, I said we have them at home. What's this? I asked of a large root I almost tripped over. "That's not a tree, it's a plant." It stretches 2km long, snaking around trees, in and out of the earth.

After the trek, we ate at a dank pit-stop filled with other tourists from elsewhere in the park, and I overheard a French man, with his wife and bored teenager, telling some Germans about the catastrophe that forced them to leave their home and return to France. It took me a while to realise he was talking about New Caledonia, a colony I didn't realise still existed. It seems the natives have been setting fire to colonial houses.

Phuong kept asking me if I wanted him to take my picture with my phone. Tourists want to see only themselves against the backdrop of the country. I photographed him on film, swinging past a thousand-year old tree on some vines, his spirit young and vital, against the backdrop of a country not long ago almost destroyed.

Death made my mother more inquisitive
The things she knows but never mentions spilled out of her over wine, like
She asked me who I’m seeing, if I’ll ever go back to boys
I told her I was never there with boys
I only tolerated them
Enjoying being desired is not the same as desiring, I said, and sometimes I kiss a woman and feel like my heart mig…

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My grandmother died in the night on New Year’s Eve. She always did have the tendency to ruin a party. On my seventh birthday she assaulted one of the girls I had reluctantly invited. I was already terrified that they would come and see our dingy little flat with not enough cups to go around, and that it would give them further cause to trea…

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The first time I witnessed violence I went mute. My mother was the victim, my father the perpetrator. She packed bags when he left for work that evening and she got a plane with me, her broken foot and the seed of my little brother. I had been a very talkative child, sometimes to my parents’ dismay, having los…

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