Poetry by Tahlia McKinnon

              ​Alexandra Frolova CC
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towers

you’ve spent your wasted youth growing up too fast, keeping company with college kids and middle-aged flakes. you smoke your first blem with them – trade zoots after dark in the local park. you spend the era at the bottom of a shot glass. fuck boys who grow green just to get a free feed, smoke the ‘samplers’ on their sweat-stained sofas. they might touch you in the dark without your permission, but when they taste you, they drink what’s left of your inhibitions. you pretend to be lovers, or friends, but you know they’re all just one-night stands that never seem to end. so you drink each other’s fluids, swallow each other’s pride, and sex is nothing but a cycle now of empty threats and unread texts. the spirits you swill dilute your own, but you blow smoke rings to stop yourself from saying no. besides, they’re the type of men that can’t be told. snort a line of codeine before they leave and never ask to stay. oh, but if only they would wrap their arms around you, the right way. how they’d feel you aching. as if your body were a cage.




Tahlia McKinnon is a wild writer, myth-maker and the Founding Editor-In-Chief of Hecate Magazine. Her work has/will be placed in The Daily Drunk Mag, Wrongdoing Magazine, Nymphs, Radical Arts Review and others. Tahlia’s prose often centres on haunted love, the colour and chaos of nature, exultant spirituality and her experience as a trauma survivor. You can find her online @tahliamckinnon and read more of her work via tahliamariamckinnon.co.uk