I left my small town to go to the city. In truth, I hated myself and wanted to die. I didn’t tell anyone. I took many trips and smoked a lot of weed. I felt very sick but there was no real reason why. I barely ate or talked to anyone there for weeks. The house share was like a battery farm to me. I had to get out of there when it got too suffocating. That was when I realised something was different; that I could feel electricity in the grass when I sat and put my hands on it. It was an exhilarating secret. I began to think about it all the time. I felt it more powerfully as the days passed and at night my dreams were filled with bizarre neon visions. I no longer needed to pay attention to the people-noises, like buzzers, around me. I no longer needed to sleep. I could just absorb what I needed, from the grass and the air. From the radio. P J Harvey was singing something important to me. Then I began to hear her voice on the radio and it became my voice. We were singing together and she would step out of the radio, standing right in front of me in my old tan suede jacket with the patches on the elbows. She was so beautiful and everything around us was vibrating as she took my hand and we’d walk out into the plastic-scented streets.
Notes:
I chose ‘You Said Something’ by PJ Harvey as the inspiration for my submission ‘Crooked Mouth’. I had originally meant to write something entirely different but I was a Harvey fan as a teenager and early twenties and I already knew the song; it is strongly connected to that time in my life and so I ended up making a collage/painting around it and writing a weird small thing by way of explanation (?) I moved to Manchester when I was 16 after leaving home and it was quite a surreal time for me. My thoughts while writing and making the two things draw on that feeling of being overwhelmed by my experience of the city. I was not prepared for it and it frightened me. The nights are what I remember most, the possibility of crazy, colourful and chaotic things happening, but also the sense that there was always hostility waiting at the edges.
Syreeta Muir (she/her) has writing in Sledgehammer Lit, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, The Daily Drunk Mag, Ligeia Magazine, The Blood Pudding, Roi Fainéant Press, Jake and others. Her art has been featured in Barren Magazine, Olney Magazine, The Viridian Door, Rejection Letters and Bullshit Lit. She received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations for her work in The Disappointed Housewife and Versification. Tweets as @phantomsspleen. Instagrams as @hungryghostpoet. Bluesky’s as @phantomsspleen.bsky.social.