i’m a city girl writing on the beach

and i love the salacious convenience of New York.

the city really does feel like this big gorgeous stripper; you can get almost anything physical and base from it.

you can tell it to bend over and show you it’s arsehole and it will bend over and show you it’s arsehole.

but ask it to come to your friend’s wedding as your plus one

be my friend, take my temperature, take a key

it’ll slap

and spit

in your face.

“let’s eat our takeaway on plates tonight”

“shut up”

moving your body from one space to another is

quick and hot in a rattling train,

bright lights stay bright

crowds hum with permanence.

but the countryside feels like a belligerent immigrant grandmother; containing

the simultaneous brutality of watching her behead a live chicken in the garden with an axe,

then the warmth and comfort of eating the chicken soup on her lap later that evening.

beautiful fields filled with fresh necessary oxygen ready to replenish

huge expanses of grass littered with organic threats ready to kill you

my body will be flushed and plump as it quivers into a pathetic death against soft icy grass,

my soft hands too premature to aid the evolutionary instincts my beautiful stripper has repressed and warped and indulged in me !

i love that stripper

i love her frank holes and absurdities

i love that she makes me feel disgusting and embarrassed and hopeful and important.

they will bury me amongst weeds and dung out there, below a flapping sheet on a line,

trauma absorbed in bark.

at least in New York my body will be illuminated by fake neon,

a stain on a pavement slab

stepped over by a stranger

and discussed later in a bar.

N.