I am a prison of my parents’ devising –

marijuana, red wine, cocaine on the esplanade

Dad making mum carry tackle and rods at 3am

so as not to rouse suspicion

from the fishermen that line the water’s edge

like clothespegs 
My new favourite emoji is the hole

but his would be a mountain

my understanding of him still so primary school

tied to his profession – his death still

a two dimensional oval shape

in an alphabet of other two dimensional events

like a fish negotiating hostages

sex hands

sloppy Italian finger kiss
I’m literally dying here, but that seems selfish to say

as if it’s not happening to literally everyone else

who isn’t already dead

as if a heritage of bad emotional clockwork

can really be called a prison

as if it’s not like comparing

a two dimensional black oval

to a multidimensional black hole tearing apart space

so inconceivable in its terribleness

that when I see it in my newsfeed I feel less

and less

and less

the feeling of it swallowing the feeling of it

until my throat looks like –
My father put the fear and awe of man in me

that men are large and mighty, silent

and unfeeling, their boots made of harder stuff

their shoulders knocking snow from branches

the way a whale swallows krill

so, I decked my heart out in lambswool

I decked my heart out in a beard and leather moccasins

and let it live for six months in a cabin

writing the breakup album of the year

and when that didn’t make me any less a woman

I picked the next man with a heart decked out in lambswool

and fell into the holes left by his steel boots

spines in my shins – but still
We all know Bluebeard was a bastard, that’s the point

and so was my father, in both senses

though he loved me

and called me lazy
I am not mighty

I am a two-dimensional rock collection

scrapbooked from an encyclopaedia of semi-precious stones

I am a bird foot impression in fresh power

harder than I look, and cold

I am getting dressed up like a purple Elvis

and going out on the town

with an American internet lesbian – you cannot stop me

I do not need my father

or his father, who abandoned him

or his grandfather, who abandoned his mother first

to tell me you are all terrible – even the good ones

I have seen the dope-jawed tigers of Tinder, the hanging fish

with sambuca pooled in their eyes, I have seen you sit there

as she clears the plates away each night

easy as swiping left

easy swiping right