Aliya Whiteley

and your cock will stop throbbing like

This loneliness I feel is of the womb, borne by women. I was sixteen when they all died and I thought I understood this loss, but it comes to me that I didn’t know what women gave to the world. It wasn’t about their lips, their eyes or the gentle quality of their voices. It was about the way that all men are a part of them. And now we are part of nothing

There are signs of change, of regeneration, and I saw the first mushrooms in the graveyard on the morning after I ripped up the photograph of my mother’s face and threw the pieces over the cliff, into the fat swallowing folds of the sea.

Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown.

Today the world moves on, and I must find new ways to turn the truth into stories.

Such thoughts about language cannot be scooped from brains anyway. This is why I say things I shouldn’t.

To have someone who tells you what to do – sometimes this seems like a bad thing, and sometimes it doesn’t. Is anything forever? I’m thinking not.

This loneliness I feel is of the womb, borne by women. I was sixteen when they all died and I thought I understood this loss, but it comes to me that I didn’t know what women gave to the world. It wasn’t about their lips, their eyes or the gentle quality of their voices. It was about the way that all men are a part of them. And now we are part of nothing.

‘They are growing from the bodies of women.’
‘That’s true, Nate, but that doesn’t make it important.’
‘Are we not important, then? We grew that way too.’

This loneliness I feel is of the womb, borne by women. I was sixteen when they all died and I thought I understood this loss, but it comes to me that I didn’t know what women gave to the world. It wasn’t about their lips, their eyes or the gentle quality of their voices. It was about the way that all men are a part of them. And now we are part of nothing