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.

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

Years passed. The orphan began to lose the sound of his mother’s voice and the movement of her mouth, the colour of her eyes, the feel of her hair. So he held tight to an old photograph, staring at it, carrying it with him, until he realised that the mother he knew had become only the photograph, an image of what a mother should be, and there were no real memories left