Bzzzzzzzz
by Tiegan Johnston
The machine is quieter
than the wings of summer wasps,
humming as they pester us.
All these years of contemplation
just for this cat scratch
of itching irritation.
As he inks lines and spheres into my skin
I think of my grandparents,
our excitement come late summer
when the berries started to ripen,
and how, briefly, we believed
in nothing, nothing
but the product of their sweet pulp.
At the end it is bright red and glistening,
the dark lines raised and hyperbolic
against the milk of my skin.
I scramble to show my grandmother:
Lovely, she says, but why blackberries?
Beach Bodies are for Love Island, Bog Bodies are Forever
After Tara Flynn
by Tiegan Johnston
I lay waiting
in the sweating muck
metres beneath the moss and sky and noise –
not even 5G can reach me here.
My body is beginning to change:
in the turf my skin dries and clings,
each hair on my useless
head will rust to straw,
untainted by silver in its brown preserve.
The fat dissolves from my hips
leaving me
the perfect zero.
Here my face
is a permanent smile
that no longer worries
about the appearance
of fine lines.
Even the furrows of my brain
smooth as I forget
to worry
about the weight
of this body
compared to the weight
of another body.
In the summer
you will marvel
at the curve of your hip,
the jutting of a bone,
the caving belly
that holds less than mine,
while I am digested
slow as stone.
My bletting body
succumbs to the pressure
of peat, no more
to that of the world.
Here beauty can rest
in the sprouting
of the bog-berry,
outlasting
the low-hanging fruit
of love islands
and housewives
from places I can never go.
Here the tendrils
of convention
need not reach me
as I rest and rot,
for two-thousand years
until some man unpins
the muck from me
and spills soliloquies
on the beads of my nipples
and makes a crock
of my pubic bone.
Then, I will rise, reluctant,
into a new world
of questions,
that my body
unwillingly answers.
Tiegan Johnston (she/her) is currently studying for her MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Beginning the course as a critic, she has quickly transitioned to writing her own poetry that has a focus on the body, gender, fruit, memory, trauma and the oddities of human interaction.