FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph

day twenty four

Women’s Land Lifer

 

 

You’re pouring your heart out

Whilst I’m eating my breakfast.

 

You are eating your breakfast.

 

My heart’s breaking it’s fast on you,

Pouring you into me.

 

The night before, a sex ox, lost inside her reckoning,

(Not cottoning on where sisters by birth really come from)

Has spread my inner wall with elixir from yours,

Lost in a fantasy of future women’s land babes, who

swim your come in freedom.

 

Lovers who came before wonder

Where on earth you picked me up from.

 

They chat on your walls as they

conjoin me in their ordinary supernatural bonds.

 

Tucking me in folds of their miracles,

Your feathered nest of lesbian idols have

Swooned me in love’s beguiling

Smoke, filling your cove.

 

Outside I pad softly, finding hearts in still life,

A thorn pricks a red globe,

Water shimmers surfaces in

Black lined up buckets against stone,

Rusts of red and green run into each other’s

Slithers on corrugated rolls of roof

Brazening out Welsh winters.

 

A strong hearted front door

Smiles broad for all those wild enough to make it up the track,

Migrants welcome here, the chipper sticker says above the latch.

 

Barns spill over bric a brac of sisterhood survival,

A pile of old tyres like 20th century wonders to behold,

 

The land’s myths and vintage seasons are flames

Like ghosts who linger and singe her open space,

 

Trodden paths of squelch and sunder for

Any woman to take a tearing swipe at, each time a couple make a go of it.

 

Remnants, attempts to manifest,

An open yard minus horses,

Memories of skin blooming in sunlight hover,

 

Planted feats of engineering in each well constructed structure,

Female brawn and ingenuity

In communal subsistence, healing;

 

Tools leaning against a wall, soon to be at work In the next woman’s hands.

 

It was the thumb where Gaia went wrong

We laugh, with gusto, crossing the path that leads me to your door

That lowly thumb, lethal.

 

And every breath I take and every step

Is somehow thick with aftermath.

Hearts suspended in mid air for time,

Love of their lives, like mine, you

Were their becoming, their crossing of their rubicon.

 

I look into the soft face of your ex

The second she found mine through a lense

Basked in rainbow rays,

Where she sits beside you,

Your gaze lost in your MacBook,

found photograph on mine.

 

I wish strength to her elbow,

Dare not even imagine the pain she must have endured as separation dawned,

Keenest of keening,

A day I could never wake up to.

 

I wish us power,

Pray for longevity for our young poly bed,

Your shot at settling down, the tilling of your soil With me and Red.

 

I pray for sound roots for all our sisters,

The tree of Women’s Land diaspora bracing all future storms in unions of

Tribal love.

 

 

 

 

 

Maria Andrews from London

day twenty two

Jen loves sweet peas

 

 

There’s a home grown movie screening on our window sill

frame by frame by silent frame

generating

miniscule

movement.

 

Slow motion

 

Opening close up shot is my index finger

pressing 2 hard seeds deep into a small pot of dark compost

then filling in the dimples

with the love of an attentive mum tucking in her toddler.

 

Shot widens revealing seventeen pots more

a mix of black and terracotta

gathering with the expectancy of baby birds

warm in the nest

 

Zoom in and slow fade on my index finger

pressing 2 hard seeds deep into a…….

 

 

 

2 weeks later

 

pan of sprouting seeds

some tips like shiny youth burst towards the light

others already straggling green shoots of varying heights

 

 

4 weeks later

 

morning scene opens on my micro jungle of leafy green shoots

tracking shot follows me out to the garden

past deep purple swaying anemones

lantern fallen over through the night storm while we deeply slept

a pile of logs and kindling glowing in the sunrise

zoom in on my hands stripping back branches

to make a pile of small twigs

 

close

 

 

 5 weeks later

 

By popular demand there’s a re-run of the movie

 

 

 6 weeks later

 

opening wide shot of pots of greens wandering round the makeshift canes

while others stray

and  there’s a stirring in the earth of the newbies

 

 

 

I’m anticipating an absolute abundance of sweet peas

to plant out for you

many coloured blooms and particular delicate scent

bringing you pleasure

between May to September

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fiona Thomson

59

Westgate, Kent

day twenty one

I cant find my glasses

I am packing

I am chucking

I am moving

and I cant find my glasses.

Rubbish bag Oh no!

recycling eek!

Left out and cleared out

by the clearance chaps???

I cant find me glasses

I cant see

Yet I can see

the wind dancing the beautiful

trees

that house the

music of the birds

every morning

sure don’t need glasses for that

 

 

Harriet MacDonald

The world

day twenty

Vision:

 

 

I’ve got cancer.

Apparently.

Am I meant to feel sick?

Cos I don’t

What does it mean?

Do you want me to act weak?

Cos I won’t.

Take me in, cut me.

Cut it out. I don’t need it.

That’s better.

Is it?

Can you feel cancer?

I didn’t.

Big Scar.

War Wound.

Yeah so what!

I’m tough me.

I love my Family.

Friends.

Pet dog. Guardian. Who Knew? Protector.

Journey.

Cold Head.

Ok, so let’s go wig shopping,

Nah! Fuck that, I’ll wear a beanie.

They give you a wig voucher.

Do they make a Dolly wig?

I’m gonna have hair like Dolly.

 

 

 

Butch Barbie, 58, Liverpool.

day nineteen

Visionary Mountains

 

“Joan Armatrading,” she said “do you like Joan Armatrading?”

“Yeah she’s ok” I lied. I’d only heard one song, Me Myself I, which I did not like at all.

“And you always wear those trainers,” rhetorical question.

“Mmmph” I was always getting grief about the trainers.

“And a motorbike”.

Decisive pause.

“You’re a lesbian” she says, kindly but matter of fact.

My body jerks back, eyes like saucers, annoyed “I am not a fucking LESbian!”.

“That woman you’re with,” we both look across the canteen at the same person “do you

sleep with her, have sex with her?”

“Yeah” I said, all casual, like it was normal to be asked.

A year of it actually. Sex. In every little orifice all over the county. In the woods, in cars,

round the back of the pub/disco/youth club/swimming pool, in her mum’s bed in my mum’s

bed in her auntie’s caravan crazy mad rip your clothes off snog so long your face is sore sex.

“Yeah,” I repeated “but I am not a fucking LESBIAN!”.

A smile, amused, suppressed.

“Have you ever met any lesbians?”

Silence.

“Come to my party” she said, “I think you’ll enjoy it”.

I did. I did.

I am!

And I found the rest of Joan.

 

 

 

Sarah, London

day eighteen

Vision

 

Winter sea swimmer

Pounding waves and cutting foam

Steaming mug of tea

 

 

 

 

 

Fiona Thomson

59

Kent

day seventeen

March: A Haiku for Andrea

 

 

Yellow spring flowers

Mark your birth and death day

Joy in the sadness.

 

 

 

Lel Meleyal

60

Brighton

 

day sixteen

(Sound and) Vision

A vision of loveliness…the lady harpist incongruous in lurex and black lycra, feather earrings and jackboots. Blue-white flattop hair and skin that is silver in the follow spot. She could be a ballet boy from a Matthew Bourne, or a mythical bird. Her arms dance around the strings, like a sea anemone in slowmotion. Fragile silver rings on huge fingers. Those hands are so beautiful they can’t be big enough. They could reach out to fill the auditorium and pull notes from the rigging cables and handrails. They might, so gently,  stroke the hair of the patient ushers, and raise from each strand an echoing harmonic in the hush of the soft darkness ; or pluck tiny chords from the straps of the icecream seller’s tray. Out in the foyer, bar staff would watch mesmerised as her arms burst from out of the hall flowing elegantly by them and out again through the window, onto the quayside, to ripple across the tuneful cables of the footbridge. Henpartyers and Offcomers, Dogwalkers and Theatre-goers all stop, amazed by so much beauty, hardly knowing that they have begun to dance. And one by one they fall silent, waiting open-mouthed in a dream of anticipation. And still in our seats, we are on the banks with them  – we are by the Orinoco, the Severn, the Tyne holding our breath together  until finally, her hands will reach and play the river itself – one immense, vibrating, yearning note, too low to hear but only feel.

Once, I would have decided then and there to take up playing the harp.

Once, I would have asked her for her phone number.

But tonight, I can only stare, wide-eyed and grateful for the dark. Tonight I can only vibrate with the river.

 

 

Fin McMorran

Teesside

day fifteen

 

My vision has no TERFs

My vision has no TRA’s

My future has no us

And it has no them

 

My vision has no pro this or anti that

Them over there and us over here

Lesbian rad fem versus oh so queer

As fuck

 

We are all fighting the same battle

We are all interconnected

Winding in and out of each other’s fear is one true Love

One world

Look after it

 

 

 

 

Kerry

Brighton