Bonfire Night by Debi Crow

Bonfire Night
Paper flies to the fire.
Hair stings. Fingers gather up
a posy, a coin, a string.
The star burns down
to unreadable ashes.
The harvest swings at my hip.
The estuary wind sucks my skirt.
Water meets earth
with a whooshing hymn.
They splinter my door,
brutal and wary,
clattering into my room.
I have no cunning.
I am barely wise,
and definitely not a devil.
Yet here I [...]

Only She Remembers by Debi Crow

It’s inevitable
He’ll deny everything, of course he will
He wasn’t even there, he’s never seen her before
He only bought her a drink, and then
the silly bitch drank too much, didn’t she?
He wasn’t even there, though, so, you know, I don’t know
What are you going to do? Accuse
him of something? He’s never seen you!
What are you going [...]

Poem by Debi Crow

Youth is innocence
Age is beauty
If we can age in our
own bodies, in our own
skin
Unaltered, unadulterated, untouched
by the dogmas of patriarchy,
We can truly subvert.
That ageing in ourselves and as our Selves is an act of subversion
is perverse, but
subversion it is, and
subvert we must.
I subvert and we subvert.
We re-fuse, and re-
wire, re-connect and
re-define
beauty.
by Debi Crow

The Chosen by Dragort

Prologue
It was a cold day when Ever dug up the first body. In the first instance of discovery she had no idea that it was a body. The remains were obscured, wrapped as they were in shrouds several layers thick. And Ever had not uncovered much. Just part of an arm. Which she did not [...]

Hagar and Sarah by Jennifer Wildflower

Hagar:
Hagar tied a knot
and slipped through it
she tapped her
skull to
her son’s
and together they
dipped into the
river of life.
She could lead a battalion
to a place of
naked peace
if not for her flesh,
wrapped in butcher’s paper.
She was unvisited by grace
and so she spelled it out
in the sand.
We are rent from her now,
God’s own beauty
strong only by breaks
in every [...]

An Old Twist on a Very, Very Old Theme by Michelle

There’s been some discussion about the Channel 4 makeover programme How to Look Good Naked (HTLGN) over at the F-Word and I’m going to add some of my thoughts here.
I’ve seen the show a couple of times and that’s all I’ve needed to see to know that this is the kind of telly produced to [...]

Living Behind the Camera by Rebecca Mott

I was abused for too many years, I learnt to survive by never allowing it in. I was obsessed with film and TV, so I made it fiction.
Then I thought none of the pain and humiliation would go into me. It was not me that was being treated like a piece of dirt. It was [...]

Learning to Defrost by Rebecca Mott

Introduction
I am writing this piece, because I want to show how I learned to connect my different types of abuses. By making these connections, I was able to live with hope, not just to live by remembering to breathe.
Like many people who have survived multiple types of abuse, I survived by living moment by moment. [...]

Pornography and Rape: A Personal Essay by Gertrude Green

Q. The creation and reproduction of gender roles causes the prevalence of rape. Discuss in relation to pornography and prostitution.
I have attempted where possible to describe my experience of rape with appropriate language. However, it is an important point that my rape was not mutual sex, nor does the word sex do what he did [...]

In the Tradition of the Wickedary, Part Two by Dissenter

I have been studying fanfiction and slash fanfiction from a radical feminist perspective for several years now, and these definitions are the culmination of much reading, writing and thinking on the subject. I believe understanding the phenomenon of fanfiction and slash fanfiction within a radical feminist framework is extremely important, due to the sheer numbers [...]