de2zussen@hotmail.com

Lonerism at an underground dance festival

Tell me lies about compassion and pride
whilst emails fly behind my back with doctor
this and doctor that and doctor please help
us please because she’s broken
but you see,

it’s easy being alone in places
like this, anonymous and hidden
I hear
Whose got a cig?
and shuffle my Pall Mall
under the sand

music takes me away, I close my
eyes like the beautiful mdma
monster next to me but
I can really feel this –

string of beats spun around my neck
reeling me in, so tight, a laser-lit
cataplasm to nurse my solitary
wounds that gape and gawk in quiet nights
but are soothed here amongst electric sherbet
sand scooped into the air by glow-worm girls

– someone presses change
my spell is gone, vibrations dampened
I am reminded
that I am here, alone

before the sky falls into my open
awkward mouth I approach a fire
encircled by green pools of bile - a flash
of limbs - a shriek - I sit, playing with
my phone pretending to wait for a
boyfriend to come back from the loo and I
stay there, for a while
back-lit by a ball of light
that passes as the moon and
lays me bare against the world
but they’re all too drunk to see

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/lonerism-underground-dance-festival

Bandages

I need you

to squish my face between your
hands and push out a breath

but you left

and the dust that follows destruction
swims through my body like smoke

there’s no exit here, in our place

where even the walls seem to bleed
and tubular snakes cry rusty tears

your tarred jacket lies splattered on
the floor like spilled ink over hop-scotch tiles in

black and white and sometimes blue
when we had no money left

and it was only last night that we

unpaged our Ikea constellation
our dream-home, lime-green and a bunk-bed slide for the kid

my toes curled around the idea of
matrimonial bliss as you drove my hips into the

cold checkered floor before these shards circled
my body, a broken halo of crystalline flakes

from grandma’s vase aimed at your head as
I buried you in words that did not know

where they were going, sad little bullets
led astray by a buffeting tongue

perhaps your heart is too small for my mistakes?
because I really need you now, I have something to share

so I share it with myself and cradle
my secret into tomorrow.

Nevaeh

My first day on the run brings me to
a pit-stop café beneath a haloey
sign that radiates a promise
of pancakes and milkshakes

I blow into my straw
a brew of pink poison
with blistering bubbles
that splatter onto
the plastic menu

Number 53. reminds me
too much of home, of my sister
dribbling raspberry jam onto her fingertip
wearing it like lipstick
until father slaps it off
with the back of his hand

A waitress with hair like red licorice
asks me what I’m reading and I show her
my battered cover of Seventeen
the teen romance issue I carry with
me like the bible

She asks me my name and when she looks
amazed I tell her it’s just heaven spelled
backwards and she sits down beside me with
her hand over mine

You know what I think?

All this, right here, this is heaven. We just haven’t realized it yet.

Her breath washes over me
a mantel of menthol nicotine
mixed with the ammonia
from her freshly dyed head

sucking on my straw I imagine
holding her Midnight Blue iris like a
crystal ball, will I grow up to be
just like her?

The door opens
my mother, she’s here
I curl beneath the table like a hedge hog
but the waitress, she won’t let go of my hand
I rock, back and forth over the cold buttery floor

and close my eyes, away from here.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/nevaeh

Blueberry Pie

My dad and I have
blueberry pie on Sunday
afternoons

we meet in the lobby
of Chateau Marmont
and intertwine our
lanky arms to form
a pretzel-shaped hug

we won’t get much
closer than that
not in words or touch
or breath and I do admit,
I desire
sometimes
to tell him –

he kisses hello
a needle-thin blonde
who plucks a blueberry from my plate
and my eyes escape the ruinous
site of broken pastry
and stolen fruit but
outside is even less
promising as the
afternoon drizzle
drips down
like a runny nose

and as I do
after every Sunday
I light up, smoke up
and tell myself to
shut up as I patch together
a father of sorts, from these
blueberry afternoons

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/blueberry-pie

Vicious

I tore that girl apart in the
backseat of my brother’s car
dope-smoke camouflaged us until

icebox eyes met mine and I cried
because she wasn’t who I thought
she was

and she ran to the train
her face, freckled with
stains

this isn’t love or anything like it
or anything that tries to be
like it and fails

my disorganized heart
opens up and blasts apart
and my brain alone
is too chemically
confused so please,
tell me what to do

I haven’t slept
in weeks

reality soaked –
in liquid lead and
I’ve fallen in love
with a card-board box
that looks pretty in
the moonlight but it isn’t
what it really is, it isn’t

I scribble and scratch the backs
of beer mats but I can’t make them
slur their S’s like you

this is what I’m made of
this and fear that I’ll be wheeled
off under sirens and
electric shocks
and I fight
with men
to check
that I’m alive, I don’t know
blood on my shirt, dust-purple
patches and a split lip
does
that
constitute a beat?

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/viscious

Fat Girl

I’m big
I’m broken
I can’t change form
the chemical cheese
they feed me has slowly
seeped into the hollows
of my bones and I am
so full

stasis and distance
pour out of my throat
when I try to say

I’ve had enough

night falls on my sister
with Steve
and I pretend to sleep
she rolls around, over
and beneath as the clock
ticks away seconds it
can never regain

I know he couldn’t hold
the weight of my

hips, bum, calves and the
fleshly furrows that
split me in pieces
from my legs to my
neck and…
my breasts

Mother tells me I don’t need
a bra but they bulge tent-like
through t-shirts. Ana says
it’s burger fat but why
did I catch him looking?

In a chlorine cocoon
I feel weightless and free and I
imagine riding upon the backs of men
echoing pleasure, I am
Godiva, unpeeling before the great
nation of Tropicana
higher and higher I fly
into the
micro-waved sky

a pain explodes between my thighs
I topple over, head to table
father tells me to act my age
a sticky cherry blob
on Ikea white
like
the Japanese flag

mother flitters about
I peek at the mouthwash
moon hiding in the dark
and I wait for something that
will explain

instead, my sister shuffles
a plate of mars bar
ice-cream
across the table.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/fat-girl

All the women in my family smoke

“He felt no pain, his death was instant”

words that lashed my brain
into a hurricane

an instant
how instant?

like coffee, a blink,
a microwave meal? The instant
it takes three women to click
a flame, to synchronize a suck
and exhale?

Dressed in black and huddled round
a plastic table, silver
trails of smoke swirled and slow danced
through caffeine steam.

I wash away the scene in
a pocket of my brain kept
for Oma, in her kitchen
tobacco flakes falling
into heavenly mud
Oma, slitting open a
melon with one hand, always
in her jungle of photographs
and souvenirs as bold and bright
as Rousseau’s paintings

Oma, whose rusty hips often
failed her, fell on that day and no
one caught her, our hands were too
full with sadness but
Oma helped me grow when I
was only four feet tall

You’re a tornado, she said, you grow from the inside

Mum has a different way of
smoking, with a droopy face
and cold-water eyes, one time
I hugged her too hard and she
screamed followed by

autonomous feet marching down
the driveway, me –
behind a bush in my camouflage
pajamas, an anxious action
man not wanting her to go

I fell asleep right there on
our street, snoozing to the
monotone lullaby of the M21

Next morning my sister tapped
me on the shoulder

“stop being a baby”

like Oma my sister could
spin as fast as she dropped
my eyes struck alarm when
blooming burnt holes puckered her
skin and I prayed myself into
a migraine

in her absence mum and I
filled our afternoons at the
cinema
accompanied by darkness
we could practice being
alone, together.

I’m older now, coming to
terms with gaps that can’t
be filled

the morning blinks into my
room through wet windows
and I promise I’m not crying

they’re just raindrops
scattered across the glass
staining my cheeks
with shadow tears

there’s a cigarette in my
hand, pointed like a pencil

I inhale
and exhale:
a smaller, ghostly version
of myself.

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/all-women-my-family-smoke

Road-kill Beautiful

Little knives in Tracey’s mind
carve tunnels to better places
but I’m glad she was there that
day on the bus, wrapped like baby
Jesus in a shower curtain
and bruises and bright red cuts

Shoulder to shoulder I ask
about her life, a sharp turn
and we collide –
tangerine hair that smells of
youth and through her lips I
discover we are bound by
the delicate fabric of
loneliness

“I’m looking for someone,” she says
I ask if I can join

Before Tracey, I was the
world’s worst lesbian
unable to even look
at a girl but her wasabi
green eyes captured mine
and I let her fill the pot-
holes of my grey empty life

just saying her name –
fizzes in my mouth like
sherbet, a kiss

I knew I could be this
my new self simmered
at the surface, like an idea
desperate to meet its reality

We hit the road driving straight
through the September chill past
snowy mounds, off-white like old
bones and lorry lights blind our
eyes from time to time. I fall
in love over and over
but

I’m not a concept
she says
I’m just fucked up

the car grows silent like a
playground bereft of children.

At Truck stop 99 we sleep
some nights, she - consumed
by a desire to dye her hair
steps out of the men’s loos
in a shade of blue that you might
find on
a Dutch souvenir or
a pack of peppermint gum.

Tonight
I see her kissing someone
else, some lizard lady with
false teeth and my heart flutters
against my ribs
but I keep it to myself

and suck my tears
so Tracey doesn’t
realize how much
I need her

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/road-kill-beautiful

http://abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/one-shirley-temple-and-five-pints-stella

Butterflies on scrap bits of paper
wrinkled and damp

drawing and praying
that’s all I do, praying to be snapped in
two so there’s another one of me in
the noise and the damp and I could colour
with me, together

Dad’s voice booms over my head
his molars like microphones pushing him
into ears and he jokes about his heart,
one attack away from death

I search the room for patterns and
colours of shark fins or spring
or the icy hues of starlight or the bold
tones of Japanese fruit with names
like ha-choo, but there’s nothing here
just grey-green drool that drips
from chapped lips and explodes
onto last night’s broken glass

our little lives like hop scotch
one day it’s crazy, the next
day it’s not

dad marching downstairs dragging
his shadow over my brother
against the wall, my mum –
a piggy in the middle
slapped away and later she’ll
give him a kick too, more quiet
like she really means it

my dad, brother and some others
shout and leave and I can’t stand
another night alone with her so I
follow them down the street

in town I glide behind,
leaping over Piccadilly puddles
where the world is the same
just upside down, could the other me
be down there?

No time to find out

their voices echo and enter beneath
a bright green sign that flickers real fast
like wings, I can’t read and I can’t go in –
a big black man stands on guard

crouching behind a bin
I peer through
two velvet
curtains

knees, belly, lace, red, shimmer, lips

a girl dancing in shapes
the way fumes do.

Back home I parade through my room
twisting “Wednesday” knickers into a string
between my bum, my breasts
- more like fried eggs
but I pinch them tight
one day they’ll be balloons
and I’ll be part
of all that
beauty

as I fall asleep
a gold glitter, unfolds itself
beneath my lid

http://abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/one-shirley-temple-and-five-pints-stella

Love is like holding your head to an electric fan, real close

“To survive heartache you’ve got to stay busy”

Well, I’m not busy enough
to dismantle all the sticky
stuff that clings and makes me weak

I met you

in our orthodontist’s waiting
room. A pocket of pain throbbed
against my cheek but I managed
a squeak, a hi, and you spoke
in vowels as your train
track teeth twisted tight.

Untangle the reel and yank it forward

YOUR SECRETS MAKE ME SICK
you screamed, the last time, and
I stood there, bloodless, blank
dry heaving into the rain
purging pictures of:

your damp curls – a liquid gold
cascading over snowy
pillow mounds and I lurch
forward a year, the summer
we went to Greece, toes touching
toes tickling turquoise sea

at night we moved like olive oil
through boozy tourist crowds in
a crisp red glow we flowed
to our room where we faded
into one.

Another image leaks out of my
memory machine: our bodies
moving without ease, my
nose began to bleed

“leave it”

you said as we tumbled through
the messy massacre in our bed.

Lovers more like runaways
shuffling down the bullet
hole corridors of Hotel
After Dark. We carefully
constructed Facebook statuses
to trick people into thinking
we were normal

typing in turns, holding our
cigarettes like ceremonial
weapons, watching porn on mute.

I noticed their breasts – shiny like
medals.

I dove beneath my shirt: “do you like
them big or…?”

A shrug, nothing else.

Now my fingers want to obey
my ache as they loom over
dangerous digits

0, 7, 5, 8 … –

a beat a breath a sigh a click

followed by
an emptiness

like the gaping
space at the end
of a book

http://www.abctales.com/story/maggyvaneijk/love-holding-your-head-electric-fan-real-close