five poems
by Philippa Greasley
This was my brain on birth control
Soil covered the moon.
It cycled up there, silent, somewhere, while I was
not
anywhere.
A soft-eared Labrador, a chain of daily pills
What’s a high dose of hormones, anyway?
If not a one-size-fits-all, bitch.
A quiet, cracked crate
through which I peered at a glass-flat world.
Thirteen years.
Then—
Oh.
Oh.
Motherfucker!
The tide rises under my toes, a spitting orange-pink wave
The walls collapse outwards, a starburst of blue glitter
The floor erupts, a silver meteor-tail of gravity
The blood-moon above, screaming and dragging me to the stars.
I’m a raging ocean.
I’m hormone-storming, against the wall, your mouth on mine.
I’m a feral fucking hyena.
The Kite
You made a kite
Exotic feathers dyed bright
String poked in a post-it
Paper snip, a bird in flight
Held together by tape creases
Day breeze, cloud dreams.
You crushed it in your fist
Your rage, a mist.
Low pressure weather warning
Your tears, a tornado
It won’t fly.
I didn’t want to point out we were indoors,
Or that your kite, magnificent as it was,
Made with all of your wonder and hope and love
Was objectively shit
And as likely to fly
as a jellyfish.
I hope you always get angry at gravity
It might bend in the face of your frustration.
All the other things
Fascism and wars and the dull, dripping hatred of difference
None of that
Will quiver at your rage.
Disordered
That word spins sideways into fairy land
a tale of those with the upper half of a hedgehog
and the bottom half of a human
once, there was
a girl born with a riptide river in her head
a boy with wheels in his eyes
a child tracing their bare toes over pavement fissures
Don’t step on the cracks
You’ll break your mother’s back
She’ll ask the doctor where her child went
Into the forest, my dear
Into the woods
Only, the paths here are
for the ordered
the whole
who dance in glass slippers
The others
breadcrumb-children
burnt-match witches
fat rats from the cellar shapeshifting to coachmen
We curl inside dark tree-hollows
Under streams of starlight
The path is there somewhere
It leads to the sunshine
The same old lie.
That path was not made for us
Not unless we lose the hedgehog half.
Spores
On a rainy day, he appears on the news.
Lips split, mushroom gills. Spoff!
A mould-spore word-cloud, the sound made by a toadstool.
Applause, from the other fungi
Adulation, from Fly Agaric and Sulphur Tuft and Deadly Dapperling
Cameras flash his words to the mud
Mouth into moss, toxins down the forest roots
Horror-show, family tragedy, never pay taxes, never write a poem.
Start a register.
Bleach enemas.
Cancel vaccinations, and arrest the ones who give birth, contaminating our nations.
The spores spread, swollen breath, flourishing mycelial thread.
On and on, crossing oceans. No one knows where it starts or ends. Thigh-deep, now.
Cordyceps-damp.
There’s only one way to be a mushroom, the mould hums, into the black.
Only one way to be.
Only one way.
Grab me by the drum solo
Guitar feedback in your cupped hands.
Drum sticks, triplets, high hat,
Amp in the socket.
Rimshot.
Secrets pulsing through the movement of your wrist.
You’re the weather. The jet stream. A storm, gathering my blood.
I drip off those notes, like they might save me.
I’m not staring.
And, if I am, it’s only because I want the end of the song
To start
With your mouth
On mine.
Photo of Philippa Greasley
BIO: Philippa (she/they) is a Speech Therapist working with disabled children in schools. Philippa moonlights as a poet, mostly writing about their lived experience of being an Autistic nonbinary parent. Their neuroqueer poems have appeared in small independent publications, including Bi Women Quarterly, Dark Poets Club, and Anarkiss Zine.