"Korpus", by Wolfgang Rempfer Photographed by Matthias Schleifer

Last night, I closed a fist
around my own loneliness,
clamped hard til I could hear
the little angel in me cry, winging
towards an undoneness so raw it tastes
of flesh, still. This morning is a mutiny of

Blankets too soft on skin that wants too much
to be hurt, to be pressed kneedown into the frost
and made sing its oldest criminalities – how I want
too much and always not enough, how I lie and lie upon
the bruised bed of my own mistellings, making the thriving
tree smoulder, bloodying the infant’s unmarked face. This is
how my body wants to be wanted, on instinct and against good
thought. This is the orchardery in which I pluck myself, fine hair
by fine hair from between the juncture of my thighs, darkly-coloured
from chafing, from an accumulation of all my concentrated wants. I want –

Shivanee Ramlochan

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet and essayist. Her debut, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press), was shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Poetry. Recently, her poems have been anthologized in 100 Queer Poems (Faber); After Sylvia: Poems and Essays in Celebration of Sylvia Plath (Nine Arches Press); Across Borders: An Anthology of New Poetry from the Commonwealth (Verve Poetry Press); Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poems (fourteen poems); Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority (Faber). Shivanee was a 2019 John Ciardi Poetry Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers Conference; a 2019 Millay Arts Poetry alumna; a 2020 Catapult Arts Residency awardee, and a 2024 Peter Taylor Creative Non Fiction Fellow at Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is at work on her second collection of poetry, Witch Hindu, and her first book of essays, Unkillable, on Indo-Caribbean women’s disobedience. www.shivaneeramlochan.com

Wolfgang Rempfer

Wolfgang Rempfer is an artist and sculptor who works with glass, wood and large scale installations, often playing with size and scale, employing models of buildings and miniatures of his own larger pieces. He trained as a carpenter glazier before receiving his Fine Arts degree from the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2017, he founded the artist-run Project space „Projektraum Rochade.“ The location of the experimental space in a private home, invites local residents to view art who wouldn't usually go to museums or galleries.

www.wolfgangrempfer.de