I thought I should say something about illness for your magazine
I've been sat here with my illness of fibromyalgia
I introduce her: she's the baroness,
Or like someone said in this terrible book: On the Road
About a woman, "a tenacious loser"
Hanging on to me like the unwanted wife (that's Kerouac) shuck it off; a peanut suit
I hold you to my ear
Oh every man and every mollusc is a castle of privilege, a wee baby privilege
Arrayed inside him: we go off quick: stay well infrequent: we're programmed to think
we are beautiful... individual. When I signed my lease
the currant-sized figures danced around me like cartoon animals at the train ticket machine
my hand slurred over the wrong one; my friend said typical fucking
PhD
There's a pertinence about whether I'm allowed to be hungry? I mean angry. The same
I'm not scared of it
I am scared of looking "the idiot"
Used to have nightmares about
Breaking wind in my sleep; woke up
brokering bad infinities:
to see the cool girl at the sleepover sleep
My friend called my illness "bleak" like he called his bicycle Pizzaboy.
I'm unbearable now because of this pathos. No one can stand me. Radioactive Man, no goggles, just the hands, Alice
how my other friend gravitates to "bubble water", salt & vinegar when she's in the UK:
every taste that is cheap, like ice water, you can keep crowbarring your senses
open You can stand
any condition for a beat
like the sweet-tempered
bichon frise
On the postcard
the man bending over her, cold and murdered, presumably
Saying
likespeak
Alice Sevilles's poetry has previously appeared in a pamphlet for The Lifeboat series (2016) and in The Literateur, and she was published in the anthology Happy Browsing: An Anthology in Praise of Bookfinders (by The Lifeboat associated with The Tangerine) in 2018. Alice completed her MA in Poetry & Criticism at Queen's, Belfast, and is currently studying for her PhD on post-millennial poetry criticism at the University of Birmingham. She lives in Birmingham with her weird cat Walter and co-runs a feminist network called PGR Feminisms. You can find it here: @PGRfeminisms.
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