Pure Anxiety
By: Katie Beswick
The door opened inwards and I ate an apple — the apple tasted as my mother had tasted, once. Fresh. All water. I only swallow pigmented parts; leave the white as the chalk that my teacher used to throw at us back when there was such a thing as chalk. I sit here yellow in my covers I am a person without a bedroom I am a flank on the rat of reality. I’m walking, my bearings are lost. I gobble up worms thin like vermicelli. I press my nose against the page of your needs, leave my greasy ink, as a slug tugs across your mind. Can it be that we once stood under the light of a not yet too hot sun? Can it be that you are the too hot sun? All the falling raindrops. I see a towel wet with the fertile yolk of a broken egg, the cat licks the nutrients. There are seagulls in London now. There are great roaring winds coming like guppy mouths flapping their umbrellas. I am a purple pepper; I am moulding splitting splicing. Can you see the red of the bald fat bird that sits atop the wardrobe in a house made of coal? I can’t find what I’m getting at. Somewhere a little girl is crouched over an open frog the way you read a book from its entrails. I am a flag waving I am a waving hand severed from a body I am made of panic. The panic I am made from tastes like berries; can you find berries the colour of the neon orange underwater like silk dresses all the grasses all the itchy grasses everything flies out of me in a curse. I am a benevolence are you listening once there were pigs that sat in the great mouth of time the great bell of the future is wide and inside it are pigs with their babies, hiding. We hunker down; we feel the night like a circle.