Journal
Articles
Help wanted
The opening said no training required; the slaughterer’s tasks are two: stun and slaughter. With a third parenthetical: Remove the organs and the waste as needed....
Anemone
Lady, in this heavy light you show tender: waving your insides outside, buffeted by the sea’s old heave ho. Nobody calls out...
metanoia
the book holds the horse – rustling in there, taking pages between lips, rubbing upper lip across them, nostrils twin jets of...
felix and jango
two black cats patrol our street felix and jango I can’t tell them apart when I see one of them walking past I...
A new animal
My son has made friends with the daddy-long-legs under the kitchen bench. Each morning I am freshly summoned to ‘um ook at em.’ Come look...
Sell like a girl
If anyone’s going to sell me shit, I reason, it may as well be a feminist: our virtual ‘bestie’ or ‘big sister’. We’re all implicated in the inescapable circuits of buying and selling anyway. This is just women looking out for women, linking arms as we negotiate the inevitable conditions of our lives – the capitalist matrix from which we cannot simply unplug ourselves.
Gabrielle
THIS IS MY address, Gabrielle, to you and to no one else. You are the person I wish to speak to about the tumult of recent weeks. Remember how I told you that when I have my first sentence and have weighed it, then I know I have my piece? I have my sentence now. I have my foundation, I have my structure, I have at last the language that will allow me to speak.
To write, perchance to dream
In fiction, dreams are a useful tool. They are the writer’s divine intervention. Like the famous opening of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, they can reveal the past in eidetic detail. They can make the murmurs of the subconscious plain. Catherine Earnshaw dreams she leaves Heathcliff to enter heaven, only to begin weeping to come back to earth.
Dog house
‘We’re gonna be legends,’ Spook whispered. I thought of the afternoon Dingo told him the plan, the four of us kicking up creek beds after school. How Spook had said the same thing then. The rest of us had listened, poking through the underbrush for toads. I knew Dingo would let him boast. Legends were made of news stories and souvenirs. Schoolboys like Spook were made of lies.
On ‘Evil Genius’ by Catherine Jinks
Evil Genius, then, like many novels with a touch of fantasy, dramatises clashing moral codes. It is interested in the nature of good and evil, the opposition between them and the moments when the lines appear to blur.
The tyranny of the gay-stream
Gay identity is not a single, fixed thing. But the flamboyant brand of this identity, which is on display at Pride or Mardi Gras, seems to have become the most important and recognisable version of queerness in the public imagination. When we focus on this entitled, Western version of gay identity, entire communities get overlooked.
The tubs
What was in the tubs that was worth saving, anyway? The journals had already done their job by helping me process my emotions and, perhaps, become a better writer. Really, I could just chuck them out. But as I transferred them into the filing cabinet, my heart rate returning to normal, I began referring to my new storage system as ‘the Elkin Archive’.
