Next up in our ARTISTS SAY FREE PUSSY RIOT photo campaign is London writer and editor SOPHIE MAYER. Sophie’s currently pioneering an amazing project POEMS FOR PUSSY RIOT — to commemorate the 1 October appeal hearing for imprisoned Pussy Riot members Masha, Katya and Nadia, English PEN will publish an international poetry protest for Pussy Riot. You can find Sophie’s contribution to the project below. And her message in support of the Pussy Riot cause is: “Artists, daughters, sisters, mothers, friends, brave citizens: Pussy Riot need to be free!” Thank you, Sophie!

Vagina

She’d always thought it was an alien word, and now it was. What they said, again again, lip-synching to the rhythm of our oldest fear on every screen. Three classical syllables, the feminine rhyme apparently asking, “Take me to your queen.”

But no salve. No. This was no Churchillian V-sign flicked up to mark a new world, heaven here on earth. There was nothing new when it began: as old as caves. Or universe. Vastness is one translation, the envelope sheathing and unsheathing cosmic volume. Revealing our vulnerability as theirs. Kristeva, chapter and verse: the speech of the depressed is an alien skin.

Shed.

She’d shrug it pinkly off, its inner velvet. She’s always been. And been here, a Venusian Pirate Jenny slowly amassing the voltage to bring them, across the volutes and inversions of interstellar space, converging in.

— by Sophie Mayer —