places where i have dissociated

places where I have
dissociated
edited by waverly sm

“best buy large home appliances section”
livali wyle

“letter to myself”
I took,
raisin memories, sun dried and small,
Attempted witchcraft, syrup bottles,
Blessing, little dark,
The baby pictures;
Beast of mirror and shadow,
Angel of hands and skin,
I wanted to be sure to reach you.
I took,
What I hoped was the right path.
Drumlins and graveyards,
Staring along canal banks and ocean edges,
I found,
glimpses of you in
Sketch books and turf banks
and the face of a girl with a gap in her teeth.
I took,
Long breaks from reality.
And looked in poems and pages,
Wrote down quotes.
I found escapism’s good side
And to my surprise, other people
Who lived there.
I learned
There are mountain ranges I will always recognise, And rooms
I will remember even long after they have burned down.
The dumb animal in me is conditioned to respond to certain cues.
History was always meant to have geography.
I say to you,
Forgive yourself the present. You didn’t choose
for it to be gone, now. The tongue of the ocean wraps around rocks
too thinly to soften then in real time, but I have to believe in geology.
As I believe in ecology. Organisms adapted to environment.
I hope to reach you soon.
aífe kearns

“between journeys”
it hits me in stasis on the platform
between journeys. when I go
there are so few places left to me,
faces glitched and striplit,
a sky too dark too soon. a voice
tells me I have slipped through
the fingers of delay and I breathe
the second-hand breath of all
these strangers, refugees
from the absence of momentum,
which is all that sustains me. in stasis,
suspended abject over water, I tell myself
a story of going back, of slowing
so fast I stop. I won’t. I never would.
we grind inexorably on to land,
to the border, and in any case,
like the arbitrary lines on the map
it’s a lie. there is no return ticket
from a failed attempt, no going back
once you’ve made your way
to find me after dark at the end
of the road, the stationside pub,
the inscrutable hunching skyline
bright points of gold on deep violet
like eyes. the wreckage of a person
huddles and cries in its shell, sweats
and watches and waits within
its brittle clumsy facade for you
or for death or for whatever it is
that it feels on the air is going to break
my heart in my throat and my body
anchored too firmly in space
for the train tearing north too fast,
too slow. from here-and-gone, too late,
I know it’s never been enough to induce
your own grief and cross your fingers,
self-medicate on sad cartoons and coffee,
forge ahead. and yet. five minutes to departure.
I wanted to believe. between journeys,
on the platform, in stasis, it hits me.
waverly sm

“brixton station, london”
a real ghost

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“Anti-Bodies”
I am tentatively diagnosed with Coeliac disease in November 2016. The
diagnosis is confirmed June 2017, and I can finally stop eating the gluten.
I need the gut damage from it to be diagnosed, but it is ruining my health
every day. In the seven months between the blood test and the endoscopy, I
go to the Cowley Tesco and stand in the Free From section, and stare at all
the foods I will be consigned to eating for the rest of my life, and my
brain zooms out of my body. Tesco becomes a place for near-breakdowns: my
weekly shops usually involve me having to hold back tears, mostly while
staring at bread made from rice flour and who knows what.
My body has altered against my will. Coeliac is a genetic autoimmune
condition, but is sometimes dormant until the body flicks a kind of switch:
usually a period of intense stress. Some people get sick after a bad stomach
virus. I got sick after a period of intense anxiety and bizarre unkindness.
So I go to the Tesco every week or so and stare at the purple Free From
signs, and all the weight of my past anxiety, and my squirming belly, and my
increasing inability to keep myself fed fills up my brain until I have to
leave it.
It’s been two years since that initial blood test. I no longer eat gluten,
I’ve gained back the weight I lost when I couldn’t digest what I was eating,
I’ve cut ties with people who have hurt me, and my mental health has,
overall, improved. I’m not angry about my coeliac anymore. My body is what
it is, and my easily-damaged villi are a precious part of me. I don’t
dissociate every time I go into Tesco. But at this point, it’s become
habitual. Earlier this year, alone in a new city, I encounter the biggest
Free From section I’ve ever seen. I should be happy, and I am, but I
suddenly feel that usual overwhelming feeling, and leave myself, a shell, in
the corner of Sauchiehall Street Tesco Metro.
roan mackinnon runge

ufus elliot

đorđe matić

“old clothes”
places where i dissociated
places where i died,
homes that i never left,
why?
places that i never visited,
shadows on the map.
castles that were built for me
in dreams of death,
castles that i never left lonely.
remind me about the places unspoken of,
remind me about the midnights that i forgot
to never ask,
why?
places where i died,
i don’t want to remember them,
streets of loneliness on which i forgot
where i’m from;
call me a loser, call me tonight -
i forgot
the name of that street with big teeth like a popular smile -
the feeling of that summer when the city was wearing the old clothes
because there were no eyes -
eyes that were dislocated.
places where i disappeared
like a mermaid under the stars.
places where i dissociated,
under the sky, beneath the stars,
somewhere in the middle of them
on a street or something,
with no name and no eyes.
constantin ciornei

I wore shoes to absolute pieces when I lived in New York. Vans, moto boots,
funky high heels with enough padding to theoretically last out the
apocalypse: I wore them all into the ground. I walked a lot, especially late
at night, especially as my brain wore itself to pieces as well, worm-eaten
and fissure-riddled. It seemed like the best available option. Given a
choice between a long walk and a long fall, what would you choose? I chose
the Manhattan Bridge in March, warmer than it would have been in February,
with ice floes still packing the river below, but not as warm as April, when
the air would have been as heavy and damp as exhaled breath. The bridge’s
organic fence is extended upwards by a meter or more by a chain-link fence
to discourage jumpers. I walked from Manhattan and Brooklyn without looking
at it once, in a sort of fugue, driven by a furious determination to subsume
my body and self in the act of crossing. I still remember how the lights
along the bridge looked, their sodium glow, like riding in the passenger
seat of a car late at night and counting the cat-eye blink of mile markers.
At the next light, you can stand for a minute and catch your breath. At the
next one after that, you can look at the horizon once, and only if you’re
careful. And then, as I reached each light, I would push those goals back.
Not this light, the next one; no, the one after that. If I stopped, I felt
certain I might never start again. But I didn’t want the bridge to end,
either, because then I would have no more distance to walk, and I would have
to start thinking again. I always remember the same details from these
walks: the sparse lit windows along Central Park West, the doormen ensconced
in a yellow glow, and then me, wearing those same moto boots to shreds — in
fact their soles were eroded down to the wood, at that point, so that I
slipped sideways and off curbs at random intervals — and isn’t it funny that
I remember what it looked like, where I was, but nothing about how I felt? I
can call it up, if I try, but I can’t describe it — a stinging like the
moment between a cruel joke and humiliating tears, maybe, or the first flush
of sunburn, when the extent of the damage is not yet clear, or like the
aftermath of a slap. There’s a poem: I have seen nearly every city from a
rooftop without jumping. That’s what it was like, those moments when you
stand at the edge of a drop and that old voice kicks up to whisper, But what
if you flew? Icarus in worn-out boots. But there are worse analogies, I
suppose, when you break it down for parts: the threadbare self, the widening
gyre, and burning through all of it, indelible, the light.
rowan morrison

“ring road”
waverly sm

“VIII”
I stroke your hair. You fall asleep.
I lie awake and count my teeth.
I run my tongue over and over
the smooth broad wall of molar
in the lower right side of my jaw.
In the museum, we saw a skull that had two teeth. A person like you and me,
but only the upper left side of their jaw. I compared their thigh bone to
yours and declared they were not that tall.
I've always known my blood lines.
My teeth are my grandmother's.
She doesn't have many left.
Molars for grinding, for vegetable matter. Facts in my brain realign. My
line goes so far back. Back beyond the potato eaters, beyond minor nobility
on my father's father's side, beyond the paternal ambiguity my mother’s
mother hides. Back over land bridges and ice ages. Back through the slow
eternal march of ash and grit and time.
I've spent the last five seasons terrified.
Now I pause and look behind.
A vision of a line. Mothers and mothers and mothers. So much deep and
precious time. So much unimaginable time. Back to the cradle of humanity
back to the first parts of art back to the first warm blooded creature with
a quick, fearful heart. Back to the fish with five fin bones. Back to the
ocean, black and thick -
Beside me, you wheeze in your sleep.
A flicker. Something I might get to keep.
(I would spread your ash along my teeth)
The soup of time feels soft and deep.
I dream.
Who of me was mostly me?
From where do you get your wheeze?
Who cared as much as I do now who first of all had the teeth?
I can never know them, break my heart. I will never hear them speak.
Their lives are lost to grit and time. To my knowledge, I'm unique.
aífe kearns

“kreuzberg, berlin”
a real ghost

“$20 on pump 9”
laramie danger

“Lougheed Mall, Burnaby, BC”
The light is annihilating and the signs are all wrong. I am not quite
delirious, but I am sweating enough that my skin chafes on muscle, and I
don't know where to turn. I found an ATM but now I have to break the notes.
The skeleton of the mall is white and unforgiving; when I look around, it
hurts behind my eyes. I have to break the notes or I can't do laundry, and I
have to do laundry or — what? I don't know why I have to do laundry. There's
a closing-down sale in a store selling mostly anime tat, video-game
memorabilia, hundreds of tiny Pokémon on keychains and towels. It is darker
in the store and so I walk around forever, orbiting a purchase like a slow
and lifeless moon. I am lightheaded and otherworldly and my socks are
slouching down into my boots. I have to do laundry or what was the day even
for? I buy my sister a Totoro keyring; she loves Totoro, loves what's
useless, against all reason loves me. I remember these things from eight
hours in her past, sick and alone in post-festive suburbia. The cashier at
the store gives me handfuls of change and I stash it in my coat pocket,
stones to weigh me down and drown me in the snow. I have to get home and
sleep because I promised to see you later. I have to do laundry because
something needs to be right. Something in my life needs to be clean and warm
and safe, and it isn't you, and it isn't me, so it stands to reason that it
has to be my clothes. I drag the weight of my body back across the parking
lot, into the elevator, into an apartment that doesn’t belong to me. I drag
my bag of clothes out of the apartment, into the elevator, into a machine
that drinks in all the coins I have. When I crawl back into bed I see a
message from you, waiting. There is a washing machine at your dad's house. I
didn't have to go out while I was sick. The world outside my window is a
haze of falling snow, and I don't know how to tell you: I did, I can't
explain it, but I did.
waverly sm

“places where i have dissociated”
cover image: “vancouver aquarium 01/18”, waverly sm
printed in oxford, uk
thank you to everyone who contributed
everyone who encouraged
and everyone reading