“Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.” – Toni Morrison, from Jazz. I talk so much of roses that I also must spit the thorns. “But darling,” she said, “even your sonnets are thorned.” My palate, too. The hue of this rose smothered gelée, ruby-red and blooded, like the jaded heart on a one-dimensional playing card. ‘Queen of Hearts! That’s my title, it’s slicked on my tongue – address me as such. At some point, I had to create a system to remember all the men in my writings because there were too many of them. I became afraid that I’d forget wh ..read more

“Your body that includes everything you have done, you have had done to you and goes beyond it   This is not what I want But I want this also.” / Margaret Atwood, from Circe / Mud Poems in You are Happy. The art of loss isn’t hard to master. I’m rather fluent in it, you could call it my fourth language. Or, first. I can wrap my mother tongue around all the licks and curls in the hierarchies of pain, and sometimes, I get lost, slovenly, even, and confuse it with pleasure. And then I taste all kinds of truths and torments that the body knows but the mouth won’t speak of – can’t. The same g ..read more

“A sparrow, mating with its echo, bred a fledgling music. I was no one’s bride.  Who knows why summer broke my heart that year?” - Melissa Green, an excerpt from “The Housewright’s Mercy” The Squanicook Eclogues. It is well-known that I know what you look like when you sleep. All defenceless. This is not well-known to the world or anyone else in it, naive, perhaps, but well-known to me because I still live with it and see it, even softly, sometimes. And this knowledge does not exist to be remembered. Like so many other things that breathe for a short time that get lost, forgotten, that d ..read more

“If you could do it all again A little fairy dust Thousand tiny birds singing If you must, you must Please let me know When you've had enough Of the white light Of the dawn chorus.” – Dawn Chorus, Thom Yorke. We leave parts of ourselves all over the place, even on people. Someone very smart told me that once and I’ve continued to hold it since. Not that knowing makes a difference, not that knowing heals. Knowledge can be a useless thing sometimes. Nineteen years of education to come to that realisation. I didn’t know that it would take so little for me to become so undone, like how it wa ..read more

“I feel that to live is inevitable. In springtime I can sit smoking for hours, simply existing. But existing can sometimes cost blood, and there is no way of avoiding this because it is in my blood that I feel spring. And it hurts. Spring gives me things. It gives me the wherewithal to live. And I feel that I shall die on a spring day. Die of wounding love and a broken heart.” - Clarice Lispector, from “I Know What Spring Is Like,” Selected Cronicas. The season has changed and that’s a piercing ache. And if I think back, we were together and nothing else. The weeds have shot up outside my win ..read more

“You loved me the other day. You wanted me to sit beside you in the dark. Didn’t I feel it – didn’t I know? There’s something between us – a sort of pull. Something you always do to me and I to you.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, from Presumption. I thought of you last night, then the fruit shrivelled and fell at my feet. I didn’t reach for them, couldn’t. For I’m not the kind that’ll take rot, and put it in my mouth, and call it something-like-survival. They had the look of sweetness, but also disease, and I questioned whether I ever knew the difference. But spoiled seeds stuck inside teeth taught ..read more

“The bloom of innocence has long since faded.” – Fyodor Tyutchev, from Selected Poems; “To N.N.” Atonement, the sea. I call my father, he’s researching the heart. He tells me that it isn’t heart-shaped. I never knew that. Twenty-five years I’ve gone not knowing that. It’s easier to think of it as something soft, sweet, and delicate. All cupid-looking. But it’s not. The heart is rough, hard, and weathered, bleeding. There are veins and ventricles, all kinds of nasty-looking-things they don’t put on hallmark cards. I think about the heart necklace I split with my best f ..read more

“Dreamed of peach trees. Dreamed, again, of drowning. Dreamed of highways becoming rivers. Dreamed of me, my long hair in flames, my body no longer a body, but a burnt offering, strange smoke rising up to meet him.” - Nicola Maye Goldberg from “Wisconsin.” Wildness has always belonged to me. The earliest I can trace it, six, when I packed my bags and ran into the woods near my childhood home. Tiny-cherry-darling, with taut, shiny, skin, and a dark hard pit, for a heart. It didn’t last long. But the stain, left a mark.  And I have never been able to get it out.  Wild Sweetness comes ..read more

“I know your loneliness, which I desired to fill with my own.” - Soundwalk Collective / Patti Smith, from Mummer Love. Promise, after promise, here they are - new, classic, chocolate chunk cookies. They’re a compilation of all my other recipes, best parts worked into this rendition, and made a little faster. I find them more nuanced than the others; scanter with chocolate, but crispier and chewier. It’s all about the dough. For me, a good cookie is never about the first hit, but rather a subtle, complex, build of flavour. Texture, too. These are that. unsalted butter, cubed - 150 g (2/3 cup ..read more

“I have feelings of choking, as when one is drowning. I feel I am either drowning or being born to a trauma. I was born asphyxiated. It took a long time to bring me back to normal.” - Anaïs Nin, an excerpt from Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1939 – 1947.  I remember when I first saw him, I shut my eyes, then opened them and drowned, beneath his gaze. There’s nothing that could have prepared me for it. Not if I had learnt to swim or navigate the tide. Not if I had strapped a life jacket so tightly to my chest, that it hurt, or could breathe, underwater. These words don’t flow as t ..read more