EVELYN MAY.
PORTFOLIO
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poet / writer / journalist / creative
links page
creative + journalism portfolio
EXCERPT FROM MY NOVEL MANUSCRIPT
***PROLOGUE ***
It starts, as everything does, smack bang in the middle, caught between some divining self-hood and endless elbows, caught somewhere in the middle of passion and fury, carpe and diem, etc and so forth. It starts, as everything else does, completely backwards.SICILY. 1995.
Jules believes, down to the very nooks and crannies of her crooked and scraped knees (first remembrance, 4 years old and falling on gravel outside her parent's condo in LA, rubbing alcohol and dinosaur plaster on the wound from her aunt, cheese sandwich and lemonade after. Picked the scab off thrice and it bled every single time) that there is something undeniably, fundamentally, down to the bones wrong with her.When the police uncover the body (bodies, soon), and Allister is taken away, and life is nothing but a hopeless spool like the corner of a sweater untucked, Jules takes off with her coat pulled to her ears and the last vestiges of what she loves stuffed inside a duffel bag. Spilling at the edges. Have-beens and should've-done's breaking the seams of the gold zipper. She boards the next flight from JFK to Palermo, Punta Raisi, to exactly where they met five years ago, met somewhere under the middle of the blazing sun and the quartered buildings. This is the land of aged Sangiovese and cheap-rich tobbacco and late nights under the twinklings of washing lines, strung over the horizon and mapping ley lines like spindled veins across a forearm diseased. On the sixth day, Jules thinks, as she lets herself into the flat that has been gathering dust as if it is an offering for some unknown God, *He accomplished His work, and, pleased with all the beauty He had created, He took the Earth in His hands and kissed it. *
"LIFE IN SICILY" STILLS. 2023.
ARTICLE: "IN CONVERSATION WITH PALERMITANS"
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I have a bit of a strange feeling towards Palermo, she admits. There is love here, and there is hate. When I am not here, I miss it. When I am, I want to get out. It is a feeling I am all too familiar with - Palermo feels undeniably and indomitably right for me, as if my heart has picked up all its cathartic roots and stems and settled here, fleshy viscera and all, but a small, undeniable part of me still thinks wistfully of the freezing harbour side and the wind on the moors, torn between my old home of Yorkshire and my new home of Cornwall. We paraphrase it typically: it's a love-hate relationship (but I remember years ago when I read that love and hate are not too dissimilar at all, that the opposite of love is indifference, and that to love something is to hate what you cannot love, or hate what you do).**
Z I N E W O R K
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'POMEGRANATE SEASON' - SUBMISSION FOR AN INDEPENDENT ZINE
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The time is slipping into October, and there is a chill in the air that tastes something like promises or else broken deals, and this means it's pomegranate season.
I'm sorry, my love, I did not mean it in that way: the time is slipping into October, which means that it is your birthday soon. It means it is autumn, it means the trees, as bright and beautiful and wild as they are, reckless in their imaginations, are turning oranges and browns and reds, such crimsons like the slash of welling blood at pinprick site, jagged across your palm, soft skin and crumpled fingers closing over in some tight fist - to make an apology of some sorts.
It is pomegranate season: you see what I mean when I say this? The world is turning chaste, it is this time that we begin to roll our cigarettes and drink our coffees and burn the end of our noses on our lighters, it is the time when it begins to rain as if there was no other option, the type of rain that needles skin deep, drenched to bone, as if you can feel it, there, some sort of promise, a real one, a true one, something like the world begging for you to see it; to live in it. In all its coldness.
This is what I mean when I say it is pomegranate season. They are springing up from the ground in their ever-branches, like beads of blood they survive along the callous edge of bark, and this. This is what I mean. Look at the way they survive. Look at the way they demand to be seen, just like the sky and chilled-to-bone rain. Look at the way they weep their scarlet into the October morning. I know it is your birthday, but it is pomegranate season.Do you know the story behind them? The one with Persephone?How do we become myths like that? Is there a way I can carve a pomegranate from the centre of your chest, is there a way I can kiss your feet and wash your hair and make an uncut throne for myself here? If I whittle it away, if I see how the flesh peels back from itself and makes a new opening for me, however rotten, however fucked beyond repair - if I whittle it away, is there space for me in your pomegranate heart? Is that how I become your myth?Before I tell you of love, let me tell you about her: I will tell you of the ways she lost something of herself there. How each seed cracked under her tooth like a promise and she lost something of herself - - there. Left it behind, returned her own body to the violence of motherhood. Let me, if you will, explain that when I say pomegranate I am saying this - I am saying beyond. I am saying gone. I am saying, my love, there is something intrinsic and cyclical and utterly wrong with us, and that it is pomegranate season. It is the time to love in all the wrong ways.
'PEOPLE WATCHING'. STILLS. 2023.
ARTICLE: 'THE ART OF FOOD IN PALERMO'
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I have, for the most part, finished, but there is something I need to ask. I have the Italian translation written down next to me, but I ask "Inglese?" first, because there seems to be a way my mouth trips and stumbles over the illustriousness and grace of Italian, the way an un-oiled door might creak on its own hinges. This is, I can only assume, a bi-product of my English upbringing, a language harsh and guttural and exclusive - one that I know inside and out, like the back of my own hand. I cannot yet adapt the clunkiness and hard-ridged edge of my British dialect to what I have begun to slowly understand as the language of poets.
"Si," the man smiles at me. "I speak English."
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"I grew these myself," my host says, holding up a small orange. "Mandarancio, we say."
"In England we call them satsumas," I smile back. It is a little thing, soft-skinned and solitary in the fruit bowl. I am reminded of the poem by Nina Lacour: "She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way."
Z I N E W O R K
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ODE TO A LOST BOY
It is December, now, which means it is time to say goodbye,
it means that it is time to collect all of our have-beens and almost-dids
together and pack them in an envelope, sealed
in red wax, promised like kisses and crumbs. You, with all your
cold lips and immovable stern-ness, you, whose father
taught you to hunt when you were only small and you said
the first time I learnt how to love was wrist deep in a deer.
Every year the frost descends upon the lake,
every year I watch as the amber that binds us thaws
into leminscate cracks that
crunch underfoot and spider along the windows that glow from
within. Neither of us were ever inside those houses,
neither of us learnt what a love letter looked like except
for a cold hard shoulder and the backs of our teeth. You
and I, with our skinned knees and the dirt under our fingernails.
I will miss this (the way not to love).