FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph

Thyroid normal

“thyroid normal, B12 normal, so no problems there”
“Great”
“However, you are considered menopausal if the FSH level is above 30..and yours is 99”
“Oh right so that’s a yes then”

99, fucking 99, it’s meaningless to me.

“Er, what exactly does 99 mean?”
“It means your pituitary is flogging your ovaries to death trying to get them to ovulate”

Inward image: ovaries lying in flogged heap refusing to get up saying “fuck off! You tip that toxic blue shit in for months then expect to get a rise from us? You can forget it”

Snow falls fast through the orange glow, tear stained tracks wind into the dark.
Nauseous taxi ride home with no solid ground, I drift away, distracted from rushing slippery gloom.
In my mind I’m fucking you on the floor, desperation and anger, unholy fragments of pain and desire, not careful or cautious, driven loss looms overhead weighted like the clouds.

Cafe comfort with random spillages and restless rhetoric
“What I need is rough sex and a holiday, any order, mind you don’t know who’d have me now I’m gonadless?
“You’re still cute though”
“Yeah cute and balding”
“Doesn’t show you know, ‘sept a bit at the back”
“No I don’t mean there”
” oh right..really”
“Yeah nearer the gonads”

May result in gonadal failure- years back I thought gonads was only a bloke thing, you know, loins for girding, all on the outside, vulnerable where you can see them, see them working or not, kick them if need be. Ovaries, you can feel them, feel them working but not really see them.

All in my mind, I see you, curve and sweat and breath, some place oceanic I was lost in and lost in and lost in anenomes and water pulsating with me.

Sometimes all I’m left with is the facts of it, I’m here you’re gone, we both hurt, thyroid normal FSH 99.

JJ 3.2.09

Squared

by Majikle

Things have changed since

Van Limburgstirumplein last saw us

Cycling around her

I sit to sip overpriced coffee

Hoping I can still see

Your cheeks puff

Up front on a giant homemade bike

Me with my

Over stuffed rucksack

Dangling from the back

Two foreign girls

Escaping our governments

Looking for life lasting love

And finding it

In each other’s

Secret world faces

Ellyott, my lover is

Several inches shorter than even me

But three times as strong

Astute jockey always pushing through

What else can a dyke woman do?

Over tram tracks

Careful never to get stuck

The number ten

To Javaplein

Which too has been

Reclaimed from the squatters

Renovated and rebranded

Reblended into Amsterdam green

These days’ dykes are not so strange

Everybody is somewhere

On the queer spectrum range

Integration is the new normal

As everyone assimilates our fists

And to be fair our old enemy capitalism

Never needed homophobia as an excuse

To kick anyone where it hurts most

We, like the Moroccans have been priced out

Way beyond the railway tracks

Unless we have money

When we are welcome

To spend in the sunset lit square

Nice bikes sitting upright tidy in their racks

Adorn the advertising pumping station

As if it has always been

Like this there

Not filled with junkies their gums burned bare

The Kemperstraat stands far too quiet

Without her graffiti minded sluts

Near the Avondwinkel in

Need of more than

A lick of paint

The number of bridges getting smaller

As the city council carts

All homeless looking damaged bikes away

The cries of freedom from restraint

Have all grown faint

But the pigeons circle

The square indifferently

Just the same

The prayer cushion felt rough through Kathleen’s stockings. A fine bead of sweat broke and trickled down the back of Sam’s neck. They were kneeling near the back of the draughty church as the priest led the flock in a language dead to the world.

Kathleen’s God-fearing Irish family would not entertain the idea of her marrying a Protestant. Get shot of him! It’ll be a practicing Catholic or nothing. Joke really, given that she’d been hanging out in Gracey’s Tearoom with Rose Gilfillan every Sunday from about the age of fourteen, ever since Father Murphy had probed for all the ins and outs of the sinful thoughts Rose had confessed to having about Bernard McKinney, behind the black curtain.

Sam embraced the Catholic faith to be with the woman he loved and was to be confirmed this morning.

– Are you sure you want to go through with this? Kathleen whispered.

He attempted a reassuring smile which she saw through to the lost look in his eyes.

– Because you don’t have to, you know. She linked her arm through his.

What choice have I got Kathleen? Your family.

– We could walk out of here right now and first thing tomorrow down the registry office and arrange a day.

– You’re serious, my god, you crazy woman. He squeezed her hand and his whole handsome face smiled. Kathleen had not seen Sam smile like this in weeks, which made her laugh which made him laugh. Waves of love washed over them.

– Sssshhhhh. They looked across at the woman in the fox fur stoll in the pew opposite. She tutted, turning her head and the fox’s back to the priest.

Sam stroked Kathleen’s cheek and she wiped a tear from his eye.

Sunshine beamed through the stained glass and their path was bathed in purple, red and green as they walked up the aisle together.

They giggled their way across the graveyard and Kathleen automatically crossed herself.

Fiona Thomson, Margate.

By Majikle

The white rose

you gave me

the day I left you

in our gypsy wagon

is rusting at the petal tips.

Cells of mortal memories

Are always called to this.

You wanted our developing

To end when I pushed

You away

And now you want me

To return

Because I’ve got your back

But plucked it was

By your fair hand and

I’m not sure I understand

How our soft start

Accelerated already to this?

Train ride fly by of graveside significations,

Grief contains you Son, Brother and Grandad,

Spelled out in faded blooms,

Alone now, they wilt in holes of tired oasis and copper, while you journey on.

JJ 16.1.17

When walking over Muddy fields

by Majikle

Start slow,

Keep your eyes on the baby steps low

Do not look too far ahead

instead, plod on

Know you will get there

Find stones and tree roots to press

your careful feet into

Follow the dogs for high ground, not pigs

they look for hollows to wallow in

Scan the sides for elevations

however small

And don’t take the bramble’s jokes

personally at all

When climbing up a muddy bank

follow the footprints you know

Steady as you

ninja go.

For more work:

majikle.blogspot.com

Discovery.

I don’t know you.

So I reach.

I touch.

You sigh.

Consent.

You kiss.

I sigh.

I melt.

I shout my release.

Sometimes you cry.

On discovery of a deeper love.

We are content.

For a lifetime of this.

I look.

You smile.

With your messy hair and wet cheeks.

I know you now.

Meg Merrillees, LLanbrynmair

Spring

Look look the pussy willow’s out!

And we wallow in memories,

Hanging them on the delicate whiskers

Silhouetted against the sky.

Blue of course as it always was:

Cycling round the common blue,

Snatching bucket and spade blue,

Jumping on the swings blue.

Our film starts off with them

With the sun straining through bars

Then wafting on the willow

That we took to teacher.

And left low and bare on the nature table

Wood and wall paint brown

Kicked desk and floor brown

Loathed suit and uniform brown.

Blue now is locked behind the park rails

Brown invades our lives.

For us now the swings must be still

And you and I dare not climb trees.

Look look the pussy willow’s out!

And we wallow in memories

Hanging them on the delicate whiskers

Silhouetted against the sky

our film continues

as we carve through

into adulthood

forging new maps

Powerful sunsets ending passionate days

Discovering our strengths days

Creating our own paths days

Being our own boss every day

Undertaking new journeys

The swings now vibrate

As we jump and rock on them

We not only scale trees, we shake them

and crack ceilings

The pussy willow is OUT and proud!

Sue Sanders, Broadstairs

Enough

of these sorrows,

Spoke out my heart

They have been many

And they have been weighty

And the gap between them

Brief

They are part of me

But they are not me

And then appeared a magpie

Flash of turquoise

Between the sun and the branch

Just the one for sorrow

A shower of griefs

Rain down

Rain down

My heart cracks open

Wider

To contain this new, unwelcome sorrow

A flight of swallows

Takes to the sky

Towards a horizon steeped in grace.

Nicola Lytle, Brighton

Oi feminism, don’t tell me how to have sex and where’s the accessible toilet?

I’m afraid of losing my famous sharp humour whilst trying to get academically serious to understand what is the deal with feminism and sex these days? Usually I go with appropriately sexualised humour and near enough academic perspectives. This time I felt it’s kind of too important, so I went for trying to properly research it. Oh my gosh these academic words, this is way worse than my GP, when I was trying to talk to her about sex she said ‘well don’t worry, you can’t shock me, I’ve heard it all’ so I said ‘yeah but I haven’t said it all!’

I was a bit shy, medically desperate but cheeky and full of my own importance so we got by!

Staying true to my insouciance and starting with some tales of the medical model and my some would say inappropriate, level of linguistic charm with my gp here we go..

In advising me on sexual practices to stay healthy in a changing body, how does she know which lube is the best or which latex gloves? Hmm..

Let’s start with a bit of othering, what am I feminism? The disabled, person with a disability, disabled person, long term disabled, sick, chronologically challenged? dying? well we’re all dying for fucks sake! I don’t know, lately I think I’m a person with a disability, and for speed, disabled. Describing the full range of my intersectionalities, which I’m not sure I’m allowed, because I am not black and it was a black women who first named the term specifically in the context of oppression of people of colour, as a northern minority world white person, do I have to linguistically watch my step?

I am economically impoverished, dependant on the state, born in Wales, raised in Yorkshire by a middle class mother who was herself born in Wales, but if you are middle class that sort of doesn’t count. And my father, well if you see him you could ask him because I’m not sure, he did run away to sea at 16 to escape a violent father but the rest is another story..

Anyway back to the issue at hand.

I’m one of those butch dykes who battled patriarchy to the point of being allowed to study woodwork and not wear a skirt to school in my teens. I skimmed my mother’s ‘Spare Rib’ had a decade of political activism once I hit 25 and ‘came out’ to become the stunning butch dyke I am now, and then we all thought it would be getting better.

Well I’m not speaking about the bigger picture of how feminism is getting on with ‘smashing the patriarchy’ but in my 30’s I was diagnosed with a shitty disease so here I am in my 50’s, a lesbian with a disability.

It has been bumpy coming to terms with the lived experience of personal change which means there is loads I can’t do any more. Physically the world is the disabling factor, along with able-bodied people’s attitudes, assumptions, fears and ignorance. I did used to think it’s ok feminism has got my back, but the thing is, it hasn’t.

JJ