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Leon Craig
Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary ReviewAnother Gaze and the London Magazine among others. Her queer gothic short story collection Parallel Hells is published by Sceptre Books and she is currently working on her first novel The Decadence.

Articles Available Online


Cosy Violence

Book Review

June 2023

Leon Craig

Book Review

June 2023

The 22 year old Australian narrator of K Patrick’s sensuous, subversive debut novel is a long way from home. A matron at an unnamed...

Fiction

September 2021

Lick the Dust

Leon Craig

Fiction

September 2021

When you misplace something in the library here, it stays lost for a very long time. The eighteenth-century catalogue...

I’m screaming lying alone in this settlement     everything empty only emptiness sex – is a desert     evening coming home from work desiring on the shopfloor or in the machine or at some other labour of language feel it: there’s nothing there only a desert     coming home from work I’m writing a letter to the first boy why’d you deceive me, you know there’s nothing there nothing nothing only a desert     I’m in the desert alone and desire fades laying sex bare like vision like trembling on the horizon is the body of a dry old man this is my sex this is my future     hundreds of animals will come and hump me a tiger’s sperm leaps toward the clouds monkeys lick my clitoris but none of them will say: ‘sex is a desert’     in the garden of atavisms lifting my skirt, leaning on the barbed-wire fence barely discerning the face in the wilds of bloody tears I, weeping, will say: ‘look at what we were struggling for, marching naked past parliaments, penetrating with phalluses the offices of government no, there’s nothing there, sex is a desert’     I love you and your dead sex still moves me but when I love you I feel: only a desert     the smooth temple of marriage bathed in wine gone bad the raw looks of new lovers the embraces of boys, covered with feces, tears girls with black scars and bright dildos baring their breasts before the river of people dying     what were we struggling for? why all these poems?     the dying camp of peoples in the depths of the analyst you die with them, too, analyst, saying: ‘Desert’ because there is no hidden pleasure in the desert     only sand only heat masturbation and solitude     only womanhood only the desert     crowds of furious men, turning in their zinc coffins crowds of men fondling, flying on a varnished bomb the industry of depravity in space stations, the science of art in the bathhouse all for nothing, procreation is only part of the desert     Kathy, Kathy, wanking off death, I can’t see your face, there’s no dialogue, no strength to tell you how things stand for you, you’re not here, Kathy, the body has no identity in the bitter printed word     the rod in a thrown open bible, student marches little puddles of blood in a dark toilet, where my farewell lament addressed faded out to the dead students and their movement       with knives stuck in the hips with the tender kisses of events I want to say: here is the

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary Review, Another Gaze and the London Magazine among...

Art Review

April 2019

Oscar Wilde Temple, Studio Voltaire

Leon Craig

Art Review

April 2019

The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and...

[Getting] Down with Gal Pals

Feature

November 2018

Leon Craig

Feature

November 2018

There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices...
Mute Canticle

Prize Entry

April 2016

Leon Craig

Prize Entry

April 2016

Giulio the singing fascist came to pick me up from the little airport in his Jeep. He made sure to come round and hold...

READ NEXT

fiction

January 2012

Collapse - A Memoir

Jesse Loncraine

fiction

January 2012

Author’s Note   I began writing about the war five years after it was over; a war the world...

fiction

January 2015

Shishosetsu...

Minae Mizumura

TR. Juliet Winters Carpenter

fiction

January 2015

This is an excerpt from the novel published in Japanese as Shishosetsu from left to right (私小説 from left...

Art

Issue No. 7

Pyramid Schemes: Reading the Shard

Lawrence Lek

Art

Issue No. 7

These sketches were created to illustrate an essay by Lawrence Lek in The White Review No. 7, ‘Pyramid Schemes:...

 

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