Allen - Kingdomland

Watch the forest burn with granular heat.

A girl, large-eyed pressure in a ditch grips to a dank and disordered root system no tongue flavoured camo bathing in the black and emergent pool. See the trees on fire char simultaneously as the girl floats up to the billowing ceiling.

The dark village sits on the crooked hill. There is a plot of impassable paths towards it, impassable paths overcome with bees, the stigma that bees bring. There is a bottle neck at the base of the hive. There is an impassable knowledge that your eyebrows bring. Beside the poor library and the wicker-man, theres a man who sells peacock feathers on the roundabout, they scream all night from where they are plucked.

The village is slanted, full of tragedies with slate. I am walking towards a level crossing, while someone I love is jogging into the darkness. Come away from there, I am yelling, while the black dog rolls in the twilit yard. Small white socks bob into the dark like teeth in the mouth of a laughing man, who walks backwards into night, throwing drinks into the air like a superstitious wife throws salt. We all have our share of certainties.

When I had a husband I found it hard to breathe.

When I had a husband I found it hard to breathe.

I was up early, hed get home late to rub the baby, we took it in turns. He left, and if someone knocked for him now at the door I would not let him go to them. In among all the crying, I see a burning child on the stove. The same one as before? The curtains are full of soot. Well quickly, we need to escape. Well surely.

No, I watch her burn. What is it I love about the sound of dogs barking as smoke rises out the window? What a complete noise, like a pile of hands clapping. Another body found burned in the oval, purple and mystical, and all around her peppery crisps in the shape of a heart. Theres a woman over the road who moved in when he left. She has a black little finger and has been watching me for days. Her shadow is that of a mans in the right light.

Sometimes shes right outside the window sometimes I think shes in the house in the cupboard under the sink or behind the shower curtain. I hold her name like grit between my teeth turning cartwheels by the edge of the stream. The air is touchy, fibreglass, summer streams through the trees like a long blonde hair. I want to grab all the things that make me ashamed and throw them from the bridge like how I dont like the sun at the end of the day, eating cold cream cake on the dimming porch in the yellow breeze, lonely, just thinking up these stories. So I fling my fork into the bark like a stroppy dictator, it makes that cartoon stuck-in-wood noise. I am stuck in the middle of the month (again).

I would like to have some time on my hands something like a stain. Happy Birthday floats up to my window followed by your name, your purple name.

A bleak and ferrous opening in the sky a wound the kind that rots to black rumbling apart, a doctored element of cloud.

Beneath that, a geography observed from a ship, an old great state at the base of an eruption where only girls lived, carbuncled in dust, caught mid-play and mid-menses, long arms chastising or rubbing filth on themselves, arched over desks and on the swings, illicitly being.

I am the girl with chapped cheeks and blue bow with my breasts taped down dancing silently on my fathers lap of course I wake with a start in the new bedroom painted blue in a cacophonous pool of blood the moon sways over me whitely too quickly bordered by trees in the ghost town where I live strange feelings overcame me when he left like the cracking old image of a wave framing a lighthouse like an octopus crawling on land he was a god in his blood thirst looking out of the window, a pre-ghost I know the look of someone newly murdered the moons trailing over me too quickly outside the window, trees darkly mask the sky the sky the thatched colour of jeans evening coming down like hair snipped over shoulders everything in place for our inflatable dinner party we sat courteously as adults, haloed by stained glass efforts to understand me were lost like music reverberating under water or a hammock pinged at one end my safe word couldnt reach him with his head at my tail spanking me pinkly into the crawl space I wore rose gold rings to impress him (she got there first) this was outside my character