Embedded Files
it is easy to love a woman’s body it isn’t easy to attend to her mind
— Anna Mendelssohn
how much fear is in the body
we all want something for nothing
perverting the pose / hanging
on words that keep us mute
—take all your controversy
all your modalities & precise lust
take all the philosophies of immanence
& transcendence; all fur-coat-no-knickers
to be observed is to come to the world
with all your impurities on show
you say things upon waking
that we should talk more
about erotic investments
the assumption of luxuriance
recklessly slow
salute the tangible world—
how to be born on the move
thick with geometry & glamour
the marbling of contested spaces
as for the mysticism we hang the cladding on
whatever else you do
& however else you name it
there is another way to think about
what leads to money and power and possessions
the conundrum of being a good man
it’s the coalition of the willing
& the war of attrition
that version of me is a stranger now
what is the new hunger
what do I need this mind for anyway
what good did having a mind do for me?
didn’t I say this already
let noise emerge from hardship
—too much hardship is also a problem
one of the conditions of being human
is hiding in your mama’s skirts
rock a hula, rock a hula, rock
the light pours in
a lack or interruption
to help us survive another day
if it pisses in your ear, wait
& don’t salute intelligence
perform faith & sign a goodbye card
there’s no business, like show business
like no business I know
& all I taught her
was everything (Pearl Jam)
be the fuck-up you want to see in the world
chronical the escape
to grin & bear it is to reduce
the self to I fuck / therefore I am
even at this intersectional moment
of bio-human machine
& where can I put all this love
promise to think about it
the grammar of lust grief
we came to blows & I did not leave
I committed to the mothering
& un-mothering of my identity
confronting the possibility of flaws
both stunned & dispirited
the world kept yapping
& I stayed with the children
while believing that Sappho left hers
& now I hover precariously
in a performance of an Ibsenesque homebody
the errata slip suggests I’ve been waiting
for something to happen—
waiting for my dreams to come true
but they are less than red in tooth & claw—
nothing turned out exactly as expected
& the empathy reservoir ran out
on the M2 in 2020 & if the hangover
comes true, we’ll be incubating
in the abattoir, latinating with desire
The Devil Comes Up Through the World of Politics
‘How long do I pretend to be all of us.’ — Denise Riley
to be the girl who dreams of having some skin
in the game is to have a modicum of thirst
for relevance, testing the limits of what the poem
can do & now I see the only dream worth having
is escaping this socio-manic post-truth world
you might as well nod at the meme that has tasted
the world & recommends not being born
because performing intelligence is a death of sorts
the experience of being mothered can make us tough
but perhaps not quite tough enough —
to be a mother is fraught with risk
& witnessing crises has become ordinary
& overthinking is also a death of sorts
& to be a de-socialised body is to be a body
that refuses to adapt
Losing the Sociality of Thought
1. Is it a poem or is it a reminder of times of crisis?
2. [insert something about devotion]
3. What used to be a type of shelter is this [lungs that expel /lungs that decode /lungs that look for an escape route]
4. [keep left / keep writing]
5. I’ve been wiped out; throttled by the name in my mouth.
6. I am interested when psalms talk of wickedness & horns of salvation.
7. As I was saying, I am interested in love.
8. How it does a number on us.
9. I am interested in annexing the most important words.
10. I throw away my clothes from diagnosis day.
11. My mother won’t come to my wedding.
12. Sandy Hook. Dunblane. Amanda Dowler.
13. I’m interested in the assembling of self.
14. I’m interested in fantasies of protection.
15. Imagine a new type of social love that allows people to choose to be un-medicated.
16. My disease behaves until it does not behave. That is the elusive in me.
17. At the borderlands of science and religion, there is something about [my] pain that seems preordained.
18. It is interesting that in the bible, wanton women are struck down with illness.
19. I have gendered my disease male.
20. This is the closest to a cure we have.
21. Put your book away. There isn’t a single book in the world that can distract you from what is about to happen.
22. The year we turn seventeen. The papers report with one specific image: her hair was tangled in the steering wheel.
23. Thoughts become language and language becomes the [forensic] detail we attach the thoughts to.
24. I must pay more attention to the [forens of] words. My friend reminds me to be careful when using the word ‘seminal’, as it is derived from the word ‘semen’ and is often applied to literature written by men. Also, be careful with derivatives of masterful.
25. It’s in the myopic moment, when you leave something behind but still don’t discover who you are.
26. The borders are muddied when the trauma involves both the psyche and the physical.
27. I’ve always been writing this book.
28. The final event is the pilgrimage.
29. We were not teenagers, but we were still so young.
30. The child starts nursery. I worry she will be attacked by a sniper. Later, as a teenager she feels the sniper’s red dot. She makes up a game about snipers and upsets the other children.
31. I’m ahead in Latin but my enthusiasm won’t last.
32. Of course, I did not notice. Of course, we did not notice her blue lips.
33. I threw away my clothes from diagnosis day.
34. I threw away maternity clothes.
35. I should plead with her not to do that.
36. I’m a long way from stuffing a towel under the door frame to block out the smell of weed.
37. It’s time to become a medicalised body. Consenting to be medicated is much like agreeing to change my name after I married. A long drawn out, confused reckoning. Try putting a sodden rag to my mouth, try breathing through that.
38. I turn the word ‘capacity’ over again. Capacity for what?
39. They treat acute episodes only, crisis rather than preventing impending crises. It’s hard to pinpoint the moment of no return; when should we have intervened. When the capacity to judge what is and isn’t real started to falter. The longer thoughts are allowed to be set down, the more they become reinforced.
40. This is called losing the sociality of thought.
How Do We
how do we be homesick / how do we be broke-as-hell / how can we change the spaces that we are in / how do you make kin / how do you co-opt / how do we be beautiful humans
—Betsy Porritt
how do we hide / slip / morph / mutate / leak / rebound / echo / not apologise / occupy a double terrain / find past versions of ourselves / play with time / own our bodies / eclipse ourselves / consider & deconstruct rage / disclose shame / do futurity / do psycho-social-your-body-my-body / do refuge / do points of departure / put the body in jeopardy / collapse into new shapes / do linguistic switching / overthrow new patterns / attack our own constitutions / be radical / be groundbreaking / submerge text / submerge thought / portal / find uncontrollable loopholes / find an interlinear loophole / become hostile / become a tease / avoid stop & search / protest & stay safe / do ritual / do threshold / divorce from imposed language / stay political / stretch conditions / step into each other’s perceptual space / recast poetics / find an ideology / gather corporeal energy / find new jerky rhythms / demand & dissolve / be inseparable from sociality / find a bodily praxis / establish a footing / negotiate historical pathways / shelter / know change is coming / learn ancient grief / unlearn ancient grief / swerve conceptually / capture sustained thoughts / counter pleasure / do variations / do permutations / do extrapolations / speak mother tongue / give up fluids / find harmonised embodiment / negotiate hierarchies of need / turn the body inward / be sexy humans / complicate wholeness
Dorothy Lehane is the author of seven publications, including 8 Songs of [Mothering] & [Capacity] (Guillemot Press, 2023), House Girl (Aquifer Press, 2021), and Bettbehandlung (Muscaliet Press, 2018). She is currently working on a nonfiction project about caves, supported by the British Academy/Leverhulme, Arts Council England, and the Society of Authors. Until 2023, she was Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Now, a freelance writer and creative consultant, her Substack on the practice of creative writing can be found at: https://dorothylehane.substack.com.
Copyright © 2026 by Dorothy Lehane, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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