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  • RAWR
  • Helen Palmer (bio)

Rough husk you rub to maim. My heart is stretched all over my skin. Upturned crab come gannet come. Once bitten twice bitten again what does it mean? No cooking no covering. A gaze passes through a stare to become a grate. A grate of a glare with a harsh bright enough to scar the delicate lens of an outside. If you touch the flame you learn you can burn off just one layer.

Roar goes the lion and the earth splits open. You are the lion and your voice grates away at flesh. You wear your noisy backbone as a rigid cowl upon your back. Somewhere between a roar and a cackle and a husk. Throw that head back and splinter your husk. Inside is a seed bomb. Each single orange frequency a rusty shard to penetrate. Your vocal sunset slowly smears its stains across the sky inside my insides. How did your glottal tract learn to protect internal softness through external abrasion? I hear my slippery steps rumble an echo in your hardened shell throat tunnel.

Getting burnt as in losing layers and all the insides being scooped out to fit another crouching body. Being flayed as in the epi of the dermis being removed. Getting stuck as in the webbed things that fly by there attracted by the glisten. It is not skin but membrane when touching becomes sticky hurting.

Inside is a hollow.

Ready to help spade in hand together we shovel flesh. Will the whole of you fit inside the den you have made in me? Love is a quail inside a quail. One potato two potato. Third time a worm burrows laterally. Make a trench through the gut. Connect the first space to the second.

Channel my understanding thus. [End Page 129]

Helen Palmer

Helen Palmer is a writer, performer, and lecturer at Kingston University. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (2014). She has recently published articles on new materialism and gender, and she is currently writing a book titled Queer Defamiliarisation: A Reassessment of Estrangement and an novel titled Pleasure Beach.

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