Issue 33: Paige Pearson

Dinner Party with Remedios Varo

I am unlearning the cat, that code of Os violining my muscles’ rosin stone. I a little cat gut, the tense winter smoker, depressed as an apricot pit. They say: you must be domesticated; you must learn to sleep in a bed and you must stop eating cancers you little tumour with teeth. Girl, you stink. And you think rather like a child. You’re a mirror without depth; a funhouse haunting. The redhead with a toilet number. A small intestine with a stoma. A waiting list therapy, and you the last name in the phonebook; a fat one hundred and three.

I eat with the Virgin of Remedies. She’s quite a Pink Panther biscuit, a cat like me; hates to be touched, won’t share food. Her owl face is not unlike a dissected heart, a Biology class on folding, an origami won by tapeworming. What is our art, if not a glass assemblage of eyes? I catatonic dancer, you poverty crazy lady; Our Lady of the Lithium. Us spitting urns like two boys off the bridge. Us two catcalls of the void. Our Virgin of the Insulin. I’m fat as a pancreas; I’m a juicy sweetbread slut. A burlesque paracetamol with a cardboard bowler hat, and you play doctor, my compère.

I built my cat body in Python; we are witches without genitals. You give me an omelette made of human hair, I give you my pair dadeni. My holy grail.

Hythe Hill

Hey good looking and glorious squat; the flesh underside of your lip cigarette séance. You are my girlfriend. Got character like a warehouse does; grows vintage Marlborough’s instead of roses. And folds their petals into small bouquets to jubilee the quay. My partner – he says – my risk-taking behaviour is going to get me murdered. You stylish beacon or lightship; wearing dogshit in your hair with flair and singing soap operatics.

Your filthy gusset estuary. Shipwrecking shopping trolleys; vibrant sex toys. I am a puritan. You are an Essex girl. Francis Bacon did you a wonderful tramp stamp. And road debris is an aesthetic we wear proudly in our feet. So you must wonder – could we have been ballerinas or Londoners – had we not preferred poverty porn? And masturbated to it in public; two cats rubbing their brickworks.

We troubadouring Staropramens; drinking celestial spaces from two pint springs. Cosmic hangover; you sleepabout roundabout making dock men fanatics seasick. Am I making meaning between your toes and paving stones? Feting your bins, your seagulls. I have memorised the filthy pathways of your body. You’ve not murdered me yet. But here’s hoping.

Gorgeous oatcake; my lady latex cartoon in blacklight. Rhythm and blues blessed foam padding and that sea spray. My deck of a house shipwrecked by your catwalk to the drink. Jane Morris eating oranges with all the sauce of a pomegranate. I am Southern Rock. Picking at my teeth with craneflies. You eat nothing but mosquitoes. We blend chickpeas to spread on oatcakes. We are conscious of our figureheads.

Pentheus plays lingerie football at the weekends. It is something to indulge in – peering down the television plughole – being outside the Weimar Republic. Unable to eat pink meat and honey. We are learning to animate spaces between the brickwork; the blood mites and Parma violets. We are learning what tastes like blood and what tastes like flowers. Or what tastes of each other; flowers and blood.

You blonde sixties do glam kitten marigolds. Our black mould kitchen Rothko. My Lana or icon. Bound with your papal tiara and faux-leather couch. Taken to trial by art gallery directors for heresy. I am wearing palm leaves. You’ve sewn a bodycon dress from red wet seeds. Look at us. Are you looking?

Malva

Our sun’s two lemons and a brass bowl. Existing in reflective light; catching all the thunderous dust of a cat’s eye. Walking in stained glass you molten greenhouse. I cathedral in the heat. We are blisters and perennial nipples. Ringing the stigmata on our feet in lipsticks. You my starlet sheer-dress; call me your Medb Queen; an Israelite or Celt parting the red lips of the dead.

City trail erotic. You buddleia. I’ve as many nerve endings as a nettle. Eight thousand Romans. This is indigestion or love. Deeply unethical. Us Wikipedia entries. Our roots and digital obsolescence. I’ve always traded in organs but you make me vegetarian. This cycle path 7am resurrection. That hot shit incense scorched as a dog biscuit; you communion wafer and Labrador.

It is strange. To walk alone and yet be surrounded. By all your eaters. We are locusts. This century’s corrupted your gelatin and made it American. My mallow vows. You awful weeded wife. To halve and to stew. And make medicinal.

Echocardiogram

Here’s a toxic otherworld or electrical transformer. Never expected to be spread here with you; a cosmos or itemised shopping receipt. Lying in concrete as a dog’s paw. A morning glory creature; lining the edges of this body with seeds. Seeing – with all the clarity of a butcher’s window – my chest as bindweed.

I’ve been reciting all my headlines and Odysseys. Such a good little thing who always took her vitamins and only smoked a little. And drank Achilles under the table - only once. To be made an aperture in jelly or some taxidermist’s ferret on the gurney. And treated as a fine Italian leather belt; ultrasound technician with an awl and pulse to pick.

Well – I am pouring my tannins into the river and being a good pollutant. The female body is organic and abundant in wasteland; us ragworts. Fae rides and dressage. Glowing between the flint of my ribs. Missing a beat per minute. Bent under the weight of this city.

Paige Pearson is a prose poet from Aberystwyth, Wales. Her work has previously been published in Blackbox Manifold, Stand, the Cambridge Literary Review, and the Chicago Review (under the name Paige Smeaton). Her first chapbook, Blackthorn, was published by O-Blek in 2022.

Copyright © 2025 by Paige Pearson, 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