by Charly Cox
bodies
You can turn them off and on
You can make them fat then thin
You could do a lot of courageous stuff
If we gave them enough space to breathe in
The prodding is an obvious hurdle
And the feeling your stomach feels
When it’s near ready for its contents to curdle
The thighs leaning back
Trying to impression a gap
Waiting for a waistline
To waste away
It’s all a trap
Squeezing anxiously at your face
And your nail beds being the last thing that you could taste
Wondering if down there is tight enough
Wondering if your jaw line is slight enough
Enough
These bodies that we’ve made
Are much stronger than we ever knew
Before we saw what we’d face
They’re bigger than our thoughts
And sturdier than our psyche
It’s a miracle that they can’t speak
Because if they could they’d shout
WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LIKE ME
I’m doing so much stuff
That you don’t ever see
I’m forcing organs and beating breaths
I’m keeping us alive, quietly
And all you do is complain
What’s sad is it’s fair and often contrite
We do all of this personal grieving
Even though we know that it’s not right
But how we can we change our learnt perceptions
When the thoughts that we breed are invited to receptions
Daily
To listen to our own lack of worth
When our bodies are trailed through media’s dirt
When school is not about grades but the length of your skirt
If I’m half a size smaller will I be liked first
I’ve only had liquids so how do I quantify thirst
When sex isn’t about love but ‘how much did it hurt?’
When do we remember our worth
It really is worth it
To think about how we’re working
Not to fixate on the vanity parade
That we’re constantly scrolling and old school surfing
This stuff we consume is so fleeting
When there’s stuff that supports us a whole life time
That keeps us breathing
And we shun it
Tell us in a lottery of bodies
Everyone else has won it
But us
That’s crazy
Crazy that we fill ourselves with so little that we’re hazy
We can’t think properly
Because our diets are so light
That our concentration’s sloppy
That our skin is so grim
Because we drink ourselves so wobbly
Our head bangs so bad that we can’t help but think somberly
We’re chain smoking at the sight of a sky
So you can just pause for a moment
And on your own sigh ‘what’s wrong with me?’
That is not a good use of a body
It should be angry and charging
Not knackered and starving
It has so much power to be starting
Anything we drive it towards
Past a distraction of how we treated it before
Past us ignoring its own personal encore
To be reignited
For the love of whatever is good
What the hell are we fighting?
When the skin we’re in
Holds us closer than our next of kin
Ever could
Why are we fighting against something
That gods never would?
Why are we bowing to a new fate
That our muchness is weighed up to
To the weight that we weigh
That our sumptuous ethereal smart humanness means
We’ll always think we are paupers
But have the same bodies as queens
sexy
I am not yours
To be beautiful for
I do not clothe myself
To be adored
The most finite of knowledge
That I can keep steady
Is that I am mine
To feel sexy.
she must be an adult
age
You are eight years old, tiny toes and fingers have clambered up onto the sofa and sprawled, soft head first, onto the lap of your grandfather. You unpick a packet of Chewits cautiously, popping a pink one in your mouth and clammy handedly produce a yellow one for him. In between each chomp he smiles
‘One day you’ll be as old as me, I never knew I’d be as old as me.’
It frightens you. Your eyes close and you sigh. He pauses, rushes his hands through your hair and grins
‘Think of all the adventures you’re going to have. I wonder who you’ll marry? I wonder if that man has been born yet, where is he in the world? I wonder who you’ll decide to be. Isn’t that exciting!
You just don’t know yet but I know it’s all going to be brilliant.’
It sticks with you much longer than he ever let it be a thought. It sticks with you until those questions grow around your ribs and seep into your lungs, you push them out past sighs and lengthen them to breaths. You let them grow to become place holders for answers.
Your mother and your grandmother sit across from you on that same sofa, you are now fourteen. The dips and peaks of their profiles are identical to yours, their fidgets mirror, their breaths beat similar.
You think of all the adventures they’ve had, the mistakes they’ve made and the promises they’ve kept. The women they’ve become. The powerhouses and strong-willed statues, the no-nonsense and all loving, the triers and succeeders, the women.
You open up the place holders your grandfather first created and stamp them there as quotation marks, these are the women you too will become. Growing up, in that pause, is suddenly less daunting.
But before you know it it’s 3 a.m. on a Monday and you’re typing cover letters with one hand and spoon feeding yourself baked beans on penne pasta from your bed, there is an old soup stain on your top making friends with a much older red wine stain, there is chipped nail varnish on your veneers from gnashing, forty-three unread text messages, fifteen new Tinder matches and one series of Master of None replaying over and over on an infinite loop in the background. The room smells tired. You fall asleep, everything left in its place.
Four hours later, in your mother’s blazer and your grandmother’s dress, shoes that your father once bought you and a necklace you ‘borrowed’ from somebody else’s jewellery box, a little girl looks up at you with her pearl drop eyes of hope and wonder, unstuck momentarily from the moving landscape out the commuter train window and she surveys you. You smile at her as your ovaries trick you with a pang. She nestles her face behind her hands and takes another peek through her digits. She is wary. She looks at you, really looks, gaze fixated, and sees you, wholesomely, as an adult. When did this happen? It all happened so fast. And did it really happen at all? You want to shake her, lift off your blazer and show her your pyjama top still worn underneath, pull out the small bunny rabbit toy that you hide in your handbag for comfort, read her the panicked text messages to your mother that scream
I don’t know how to be an adult.
Scroll through countless photos of you in Ladbroke Grove just last week with red eyes and greasy hair, ham-fisted with receipts from a drunken hotel night stay, empty packets of cigarettes splayed across the table, searching for loose change to get the train to work, to get this train to work. ‘Shit, I’m going to work.’
Shit, I’m an adult and nobody told me.
goldman sachs
Sometimes it doesn’t go right
The wayward nights
Yo
u imagined
The taxi trips with strangers
Paying bar bills with party favours
Sometimes it isn’t a film
No vignette close enough
To cradle you within
Its dark expanse and tell you that
Not all of these men want adventure
Not all of them are character studies
Not all of them think you’re funny and smart
Not all of them want to hear about your father
Not all of them want to be a consensual partner
Sometimes it doesn’t go right
And sometimes it’s best
To go home and straight to bed
Instead of exploring the night.
I’ll be home in the morning
This is a mistake
But something in my loins says yes
Something allows him to undress
Something takes me straight to bed
And that something doesn’t live in my head
It sits a pain within my chest
Beyond a place where secrets rest
It’s dark and I don’t like it there
It’s packed with secrets and overstuffed
Yet what it screams that mutes me deaf
The most blatant entry I misread
Says simply:
Don’t do this
When all you want to be is loved.
too young
It drizzled down
Precious and thin
Weaving matted through my hair
My neck crooked over the side of the bath
And your shoes gone from the bottom of the stairs.
I must’ve been
Only fifteen
But that nausea was centuries old
My nose plugged with the scent of your cheap aftershave
And the shower head spitting out cold
You said I no longer tasted much like love
And my hips were the wrong side of wide
I tried to wash you like dirt from off my red mottled skin
And let you sink with the suds down the pipes
But you left a scum that stuck to the sides.
say you’re sorry
She was nearly my age
When she first heard your name
It will take until her age
For me to walk away
And now at your age
Everything’s too late.
they came out and I stayed in
All my friends are gay
And I wouldn’t have it any other way
Except on Friday nights
When I’ve got no one to get off with.
E1W 3SS/Billy
Come up
And come down with me
Taste your figures
On the furs of your teeth
Youth might be wasted on the young
But slip into this neon vulnerability
And we’ll be wiser when the morning comes
That ravages on our undressed mess
But sip on the warm-ending edges of the sleepless sun
And we’ll be wiser before we’re wasted again
On all the thoughts we slurred and acted on
Come up
And come down with me
We can’t do this when we’re thirty.
pint-sized
I’ve got this thing with kids on trains
I sit there mesmerised
Watching the silhouettes of flashing landscapes
Reflect like magic in their eyes
Watching their tiny bodies perform
Pint-sized
Attempts at behaving
Swaying
With each stop
I’d quite like to swap
Because I can’t remember anymore
Of how it felt to take up such little space
And for that to be a good thing
For my learning and naivety
Grabbing hands and misused words
To be a sweet thing
How it felt to be a glaring honest thing
I wish back then I would have taken note
Could’ve scraped together all the statements I didn’t know to sugar coat
And kept them in my armour
Kept their tangy sour taste and smile at them with the same charm
A new little girl now has
With my old grabbing hands
I want to shake her to realize
That her mischief is perfect
And that growing up is a downsize
Just stay put,
And only move as the train moves.
whatsapp
In these times
Of double ticks
Last seen minutes
And ghosting pricks
Just text your girls
And save your breath.
roots of them/sorry, jacob
They’re so beautiful
And even when I feel not so
They still remain
And there’s a beauty in knowing
That when it can’t be self-proclaimed
It can still be breathed in, seen and attained
That those around you’s beauty always escapes your change
Well sort of, same same
But different
You see it as a caged reminder of wrongdoings
An unmeasurable imprisonment
It thrashes a hotter whip
Lashes of a slobbering trip
As you lick your lips
And taste the saltiness of their beauty
Instead of smelling it as sweet
Sometimes the feelings we mistake
As a clarity on others darkness
Screaming solemn swears that
The harmless are heartless
Is us projecting our fear of losing beauty
Of power, of wonderment, of worth
But for what it’s worth
What I’ve learnt
Is to swallow it down and accept it
Pick up a tougher smile as you exit
Pick up what you admire and inspect it
Until you understand why you respect it
Take time to realise the roots of them are the roots of you
And you’ll think yourself beautiful too.
kids
Our bones stuck like honey
Silken gestures grazing ground
As we flew over handlebars
And relished in dotting our bloodied scars with the same tiny digits that made shapes with carbon-backed stars.
The nonsense made sense in its cherry-rich taste of speaking a language of pulling funny faces.
The fear of inferior was nothing but a shifting canvas that smelt like summer
Shedding our winter skin to become a
Firecracker of innocence
An uncorrupted, feverishly disruptive
Blazing ball of wonder
And when we expanded from its amber shell
Spitting sparks as we embraced the swell
Each filament of learning spun a grand farewell
And spoke a greeting to the less bright
Other side of where those taller weren’t glowing
I’m sure we’d never have grown up if
We’d been told where we were going.
forever
Can you be related to a soulmate?
Can you be born into fate?
Can two nodding identical profiles
Bear such growing worldly weight?
I sympathise my all
With those who need to find the one
When all of my searching
Stopped when I begun
Because the child in me has always known
The only one I need
Will always be my mum.
baby ella
Fingernails flat like scraps of seashells
Pull and paw at a tide of softness
Scratching out unthought feelings
Human hieroglyphics
Of maternity
As these tiny digits cling to me
Until I breathe out a shape of my heart
And imagine it as your own
No longer frightened
Knowing that all that’s within me
Hands like yours one day
Will hold and call home.
adult
You are shoulder to someone’s waist in rows of black. A ceiling above you fifteen times as many feet as you stand and as ornate and detailed as the Skechers trainers you’d begged to wear today but had been denied. Mum said they were inappropriate. You didn’t know what that meant. They were black and silver, just the same in your mind’s eye as every outfit you’d ever seen in Disney shows that were worn to funerals. You take a pew, bashfully battle your lungs for song and try to ignore the sobs. Grief is an unexplored, unexplained alien that greets you at a coffin, offers out its hand in introduction and pulls away quick enough for you to remain unacquainted properly. You go to offer it small talk but it is already someone else’s turn. You sit at a wake and watch people get drunk, laugh and tell stories, cry quietly safe in the knowledge that you, a small child who knows nothing, is only watching. There is something inside of you that begs to feel sad, to understand. You pull and push for tears, fists banging against your eyes to see stars, wishing for water but nothing comes. You feel your age for the very first time in a way that you’ll always remember. You are eight. You feel young. You feel untainted. You feel like today is a controlled blip in the universe being driven by a car that will keep on going to a place where you’ll never have to return. You only need to stand at this place once. You tell yourself, despite your known and sure naivety, with such total confidence that today is not normal and will not ever have to happen again. The world that you know is not made to allow for such capacity for sadness. The world that you know is so new it cannot end.