Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 31 i Popshot Magazine

Sat straddled by my mother in the porcelain tub, she bathes me in grey water freshly rinsed off her own skin. The bathroom is silent, save for the monotony of her palms cradling the suds that trickle over my hair, down my bared spine, landing back in her lap. I hug my hands to my chest, not yet succumbing to the urge of becoming Ariel with her clam-clamped breasts. Budded nipples braille declarations of youth. The snugness of our bodies is maternal, uncorrupted, her whiskered scallop embracing me - its pearl - like sea pining for sand, sun for the offing. We are closer than we have been all day, a child’s affection still clandestine for fear of loss. Tentatively, I lean into her every touch. The night does this…

A clutched thumb and I fall to pieces.Just about hold it together on the surface.Keeping up appearances, like it's all okay,just a blip on the radar, a short passing phase,that we'll look back on and laugh at.Those misshapen days, when we satat both ends of a roomand touched nothing.Mapped paths through the garden,like scouting a maze. Sterilised giftsbefore handing them over, whileangling necks in peculiar ways. When I was a child, mum, you took up careersto permit me the time to make sense of my fears,and throughout my whole lifeyou have shaped and supported me.Smoothed out the warped thoughtsthat bent and distorted me.Loved in a way that so very few can.Cradled our disparate lives in your hands,and held them against you in times of disquiet,spared us the worst of the…

Jenkins fucked me on a beach at Dungeness and my knees carried the indents of pebbles for days after. I’d seen him the night before in a drag pub in Brighton. In a tight fitting blue T-shirt and jean jacket he was just my type. I was eighteen, studying art at the Poly, and already drunk when I arrived alone at The Mermaid that night. Jenkins told me later that he hadn’t seen me come in, though I couldn’t keep my eyes off him from the moment I got there. Watching him talking and smiling, inhaling on his cigarette, everything in my mind racing, telescoping towards him. That may have also been down to the tab I’d just dropped. He was so at home with his casual, sly mannerisms, the…

January 1982 I gaze through one-way glass. Empty my mind, free floating and detached, waiting for a spark, a jolt, a drum roll—anything at all that will enable me to say effortlessly, unequivocally, “It’s you. You’re the one.” I gaze, unblinking, until my eyes hurt and the faces of the six men standing shoulder to shoulder merge into a swirling, disjointed pattern. A crack of thunder makes the strip-light flicker, snapping me back to the observation room and the stale smell of cigarette smoke. Garda B warms herself beside an oversized radiator. “Take your time, Carol,” she says. “Before making your identification.” “How will I know for sure?” I say Her brow scrunches. “Just ask yourself if any of these men resemble the perpetrator,” she says. “Being here will surely…

A boy broke my heart once. It’s fine, no really it is. I’m a mosaic maker, I make masterpieces out of fragments and shards. Sure, it took me a while to collect them all at first. My hands were too cold, too numb, trembling too frantically to grasp the dustpan and brush. So they remained scattered on the cool wooden floor beside the fireplace, right where he shattered me. I guess the fire really did burn out on that one. But it’s summer now, I’m much warmer, my floor is clear. Piece by piece I rebuilt myself. All it took was a little patience, a lot of glue and the unexpected support of the boy next door. He moved in almost two months ago and stopped by on his very…

She fell deeply, madly, inexplicably in love with the head of lettuce. It sat there so unobtrusively under the grocery store lights, bathed in a fine mist of shining water. She wasn’t even looking for love, but it found her, right there in the produce section, Muzak providing the soundtrack. The pale green leaves glowing like harbingers of better things to come. Even the name Iceberg filled her with a sense of wonder, of hope for new and exciting adventures. She reached forward slowly but another hand was faster and as she watched the lettuce leave her, cradled in the arms of another, she tried to convince herself it was for the best. Her mother certainly wouldn’t have approved and what would they have raised their children as, people or…

Gabe Mayfield was an artist who painted nothing but clothing. He painted polka-dot pyjamas dangling on washing lines, pressed suits laid out on beds, lacy underwear caught on lampshades and coloured t-shirts fusing together in washing machines. His latest exhibition was imminent so he was confined to his studio, a big shed at the bottom of his neglected garden. He gazed moodily at his unfinished painting. He’d been working on it for weeks but something was still missing. The painting was of a pair of yellow jogging bottoms that looked like they’d just been stepped out of. A cherry-red top lay next to them on the bathroom carpet. The background was sea-blue; it looked too bright and too empty, like a room without any furniture. Gabe took a final swig…

If I weren’t a morning person, I thinkI’d like you better. If I could sleep—notlie waiting for your heavy eyes to blinkawake, for you to pull your covers taut.Golden light drips off blinds, shifting the sun-drawn topography lines across your sheets.You breathe soft snores to my throat, hold your thumb,middle finger, to my chin and the creasebeneath my earlobe like we have been caughtin the sameness of dreams. I want to partwith a half-conscious kiss goodbye and blotmy panties dry, but I wait ’til you startawake with groping hands—your tongue’s delight,hungry for this morning’s taste of last night.…

I woke up to the sound of them having sex in the shower. I recognised the rhythm of Hannah’s breathy moans and Ian’s deep grunts through the thin walls, reaching their crescendo as I gained consciousness. Having abandoned my attempt to get back to sleep, I was sitting in the living room enjoying a black coffee and the weekend papers when Ian appeared. He was naked on top, with a towel wrapped loosely around his waist: a view I’d prefer to avoid. I politely averted my eyes from his hairy nipples (an evolutionary mistake if you ask me), and noticed that he was enthusiastically brushing his teeth with Hannah’s toothbrush: the bamboo one. Disgusting. The final straw came when they joined me at the table for their breakfast. Not only…

sat in the quiet pub waiting for him to get the drinksat another table when their girlfriends have gone to the toiletI see him drape his arm over his mate’sshoulder and then stroke his friend’s facenot sexual not romanticaffectionate and thinking they don’t have an audienceso don’t have to act natural and play the parts of menon the seventies sitcom set that is this pubmasculinities slip they don’t make a joke about the stroke like men butthey smile at one another likehumans…

And of course, there is the year where she thinks: I cannot do this. And she remembers the awful boyfriend she had when she was twenty-one who she both loved and hated with equal measure; the awful boyfriend who started turning up with skin like split peaches and weeping, mucus filled wounds on his face. How proud he was. He dripped blood avariciously onto the bed sheets, spat loose teeth onto her belly, pressed her fingers into his sores. It is meaningful to think of him now because her body is beginning to feel less and less like her own and she understands that if she were ever to fight for the joy of it, it would not be for the reasons that he had but rather to bring her…

Astro’s limp had got progressively worse over the last few days. Dan watched whenever his dog left the sofa, which was happening less and less frequently. As a puppy, Astro would jump from the sofa into Dan’s arms and then out again into Jen’s arms. That memory seemed older than it needed to be, and yet the only thing that hadn’t changed since then was the sofa. Astro was dying and Jen had left. The first anniversary of their divorce was approaching as Astro’s health was declining, and this became the only reason for them to be in contact on a regular basis. Dan looked forward to seeing Jen when she came to the house on Sundays to visit Astro. They had developed a tradition of having lunch together before…

I am watching my womb on television. On my back, knees high and wide. The doctor has inserted a wand that carries sound inside me. Sound I cannot hear is echoing through my interior, visualising the black cave of my body, detecting abnormalities. I think about how dark it must be in there and how strange it is that sound lets us see inside things. The doctor with greying hair and black straggly eyebrows is saying things, pointing to the screen at things I can barely see. Something about ovaries, lining and follicles but I’m not listening. The image is so unstable: white, grey and black swish around as the wand turns inside me. I wonder if sound is like water, if it ripples and churns. The screen looks like…

I sit down in front of her. This won’t be easy. I try to start speaking, but the words die as they hit the oxygen, like they can only survive inside of me. There was a time when I thought she could do everything for me, be anyone for me, say everything for me. I thought we were connected, I thought she’d fix things, that she might have been able to root around inside herself and emerge carrying what I was missing—triumphant, saviour. I used to like the notion that when things were just right, you don’t have to look where you’re going. But maybe when you stop looking, refuse to reflect, you can’t realise you’ve gone the wrong way. Or perhaps I had just grown so tired of looking…