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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

When I was fifteen I took my two little cousins into town and had them wait outside the tattoo parlour while a woman with blue hair pierced my belly button with a big red ruby that pooled inside like a roving eye They were crying when I emerged I was hardly able to breathe for fear of the pain On the way home on the bus, Amy sang Karma Chameleon and Simone looked out of the window at time passing as though watching life being silently obliterated I remember my belly looked so white and soft lying down with the jewellery like a well of fresh blood collecting I thought it quite beautiful though it often snagged on my jeans My girlfriend had once rooted the ruby out with her tongue; the next morning had stung When we found a baby kicking in there I had to take the jewellery out as my teenage belly stretched Having that metal inside my body had been as good as a wound My girlfriend and I had wounds to nurse, they comforted, they reassured; while they healed there was a warm place inside devoted to new cells and plasma After the birth, my belly was  a waste of space, a forlorn temple with no jewel or way in I couldn’t accept the tender map of pain left imprinted on my belly when my baby was born I would trace the stubborn, soft pulse of a network of trails in my deep skin with my fingers, willing and willing them to recede Nobody touched my belly then, not for a decade My belly was women’s business My belly was the place a baby once lived If I was carrion my belly would be the first flesh to peck and rip– my most vulnerable part– silvery white in sunlight, nobody’s prize The little nick of a piercing scar reminds

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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fiction

August 2013

Foxy

Siân Melangell Dafydd

fiction

August 2013

If you don’t want to lose your eyes, grab them by the veins sticking out of their behinds and...

fiction

January 2017

Peace

Patrick Cottrell

fiction

January 2017

Every morning as I walk to school through the dark blue decrepit world, I feel like I’m coming down...

poetry

April 2014

Obsolescence

Joseph Mackertich

poetry

April 2014

A lot of people tell me my voice is similar to that of the actor Christopher Walken. I don’t...

 

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