CW: Rape
Olives
Healing is exchanging rape anecdotes, sitting on a bench outside a pub, eating fat green olives and drinking Guinness. How do you begin? She says, new fringe tickling her eyelids, When the body has its own indelible memory? There’s no difference I can see between forgetting, repressing and moving on? Instead, we trip along, hand in hand, through the half violet shadowed grove of I didn’t actually say no I was playing the part but then he put it in my arse without asking, or his voice switched, or I think he was just really in love with me and I just wasn’t, with him. I made him scrambled eggs in the morning, or I slept with him again after dinner and a few years later even after I told everyone I thought he was a rapist piece of shit still I slept with him again, made him risotto then, and in many ways he was the kindest man I’ve ever known and in many ways I worry that I broke up with him too quick and threw away the only love I ever really owned. Healing is these damp patches that we keep secret, scrunched up and tucked away parts of us that we never show to people who have not known what it feels like to be split, head bobbing on ceiling above the body, spatch cocked and stuffed. Secreted in our sinuses, in our pockets full of lint, under our nails, we keep it in these week old bird’s nest buns, in our belly buttons and the pimples on our bums. Drag fingers through my hair, let down it reeks of mildew, each week swimming, her and me in Peckham Pulse, stepping slow into the turquoise pool. Healing is with those people that we, sit still with. Hold it in every stilted sentence, starting off with how do you begin? She says she dyed it orange because they said it would wash out. In every twitching doubt and gnawed thumb, double checking our routes home, staying out, over-texting, so desperate to be loved, so desperate to be left alone. She sucks the last flesh off the stone and drops it in the ashtray. Grey as that. I dislodge something with my tongue. Catch a hangnail in my teeth. Leave a tissue on the table. Most of the time, you don’t think of yourself as raped. That would be weird. You don’t tell your dad, or your mum, you don’t even tell your best friend for that matter because they’d look too sad. You go to work. You’re only ten minutes late. You go swimming. You eat olives. You walk home in the dark. You take the shortcut through the park. You think: surely people don’t actually carry their keys between their fingers like are you joking I’m not going to gouge the poor bloke’s eyes out even if even if
Vida Adamczewski’s writing appears in Ambit, Document Journal, and The Mays. Vida won the UEA New Forms Award 2022. She is also the founder of Yer Bard Poetry. Her first collection Amphibian and Other Bodies is forthcoming with Toothgrinder Press in November 2023. @vida_adamczewski on instagram
In a place called Lotus Home,
I became sick.
Not just from the chronic pain
my body is used to
but my brain got sick from lack of sleep,
so much so,
I didn’t know what I was seeing or hearing.
The owner of the accommodation, Yiannis,
(a Greek man who
had lived much further afield and had returned
to build in this spot
of windswept beauty,) was one of those unique people you meet,
and he made me feel at ease despite my sick confusion,
fed me cigs and Greek coffee;
me sleepily and stupidly drinking the sediment
out of overriding politeness
and not knowing. In the shade we spoke of poetry,
of musicals and paintings. There was another man
who called himself Sam;
Sam from Pakistan.
He has eyes greener than my own, that shone like ‘Go’ lights,
and has a small frame, and he’s from Lahore, a refugee at Lotus Home.
He liked my tattoo and cricket,
he was always talking about cricket to me… and his smile
and the way
he said he was fine in the same breath
of asking how you were, always shook me.
My body has been addicted to opium
for such a long time my body doesn’t feel its presence,
but that morning
there were swift moments of it oozing through me,
a feeling of eternal rising and acceptance surging
through my veins,
so that the coast was heaven
and the sea was the tear of every ancestor ever shared,
till it touched the North of Africa, the grandfather of us all.
Helen Grant has been published in a wide array of magazines such as The Poetry Review, Stand, The Live Canon 2019 Anthology and Acumen. Some of her poetry and travel photos can be found on her instagram @helenlgrant
Quaker meeting
Last week God had plenty to say:
John was worried about his neighbours, you hear
the girls screaming but never an adult voice. A bloke on Facebook Marketplace
called Tash that word because she already gave away the mirror. Noah was plagued
by vaguely sexual fantasies of being a locust gorging on rich landscapes. Laura fucking
hates Coleridge, ok? Yusuf had been thinking about Psalm 108 (excuse me, Moab is my
what now?) But today only the dust motes are rising, they come and go with the traffic,
whirling up in the lulls between Amazon vans blocking the window, the circle
of bowed heads cleaved by the shaft of shifting light, then united by shadow in the barren
function room, its windows stained only by truck splash. Suddenly the silence
tautens, as if speaking would divide the void, send trees shooting up between the plastic chairs,
new buds bursting through the greige carpet, winged fowl wheeling under the strip lights –
because someone is standing, someone is moved to speak:
with surprise, I realise it’s me.
AV Bridgwood is a queer poet from Manchester. They are a previous Foyle’s Young Poet and currently studying on UEA’s MA Poetry. Their work has been published in Lighthouse Journal and by Dempsey & Windle. AV works as a copywriter, editor and translator.