Kirsty Logan & George Ttoouli
April 2009
KL
homemakers
we will build we will build a house of stone or pine or ice or whatever they will let us have whatever they do not want.
the heat between us will melt the house burn the house. we will warm each other together on the forest floor. we will build ourselves on the forest floor.
after they take everything we will have what we built.
GT
Breakers
“I’ve been waiting by a road to another town for you to reappear as diamonds.” – Simon Andrews
Only a frayed desert to build on where magma once mussed the dunes and burst isthmus after isthmus into the cove, the sand popped with heat and slicking the basalt in glass drapes to the sea’s fold, a broil of steam and salt in the air.
Now the ground is rilled with lava tubes, bulges scale through the earth, miles of knuckles, bones and pipes with only sorrow for marrow, sinkholes trammelled where the world caved into the melt under the weight of houses, houses – why risk houses, chance development when the islands are hollow-hearted?
How can we hope when our cliffs are soft and we’re full of collapse, the breakers inside us singing erosion shining with crystal telling their symbols bolstered by omens moaning with mistrust rusting like houses shushing our cries raising our hopes spreading false diamonds when there’s nothing precious for miles, nothing indigenous strong enough to stand on.
KL
Some small history
we’re halfway up kneedeep in history eyehigh in reverie
we’re telling symbols like house ground sea like bitch queer dropout
balanced on a graveyard of whalebone stays handcuffed to boys rent and beaten lit in glitter of gutter riots
there is nothing as solid as the weight of bodies under our feet
GT
Dear K,
I’m not sure about this. I got a birthday card from my ex.
‘Hope your 30th birthday / is extra special.’
(That’s an exact quote.) I liked the use of ‘eyehigh’
in your poem – it’s so relative. We went to the Galapagos together.
I didn’t expect you to get that, though. What should I make of your poem –
this process – it’s all so impersonal. What do we leave out of history? I had a dream
and woke up with the lines, The dreary humdak lopes a closing loop
through the woods / chainsaws buzz a bird song, and this:
“armchairs torn apart.”
I want to add:
like queer ground like dropout sea like bitch house
there’s a solid weight at the end of the rope,
you just have to hope because you can’t be sure
it’s not around a throat when you pull.
KL
Hush
I wanted to start Dear G, but G is an ex of mine and another ex moved to San Cristóbal and another hung from a rope just after turning 30 so it was all just a little too… because I thought I’d left that out of my history.
but I never have words in my dreams (funny thing for a writer) it’s all driving to the moon : playing bass in a punk band : befriending a t-rex sometimes they even roll credits at the end.
enough, wake up, we’re done. crawl back into the dropout sea.
but what I’ve been trying to say all along is that maybe I don’t care if the rope is around a throat as long as it’s not mine.