We bought the galaxy
on a mortgage of borrowed time.
Because I wanted
to give you something grand
and you wanted space
and all of the stars.

Who’s in charge of this?
Not us, lying in a single bed
traversing the skies;
you need a bottle-opener
for your wine,
so you destroy a planet
and forge one in a star –
one use only.

I tell you that if we fall
into a black hole,
we’ll see in front of us
everything that will ever happen;
and you tell me you’ll look behind,
instead.

We try and find one,
but our hands come up empty,
and you say you never liked
vacuums, anyway.

I know all this.
I’ve always known all this,
and yet still,
I let you destroy
any home we create;
your hammer on the mantelpiece.

Perhaps spinning through the universe
is worthwhile,
because it means you
have to hold onto something;
finally.

Take four
and make mistakes,
wake in the morning
to check
that your fingers are attached
to the undeniable spot
where your hands end.
Watch the clock
in case it stops;
Dislodge the plaque
behind your gums
and scream in silence
at reflection-you.
Tick tock.
Script the helix
and watch it spiral,
dipped in mothers’ milk,
everyone, gather round
for the epiphany
T-minus twelve days.
Creation calls.
Victor Frankenstein here?
Making something other than history,
constriction in the surgical instruments.
The fate you are going to meet
is going to be so beautiful
for everyone else.
You are going to scream.
You know,
a lot of this is about birth.
Through these broken walls
I hope you realise
that everything here
is supposed to create life.
Even the mistakes.
Someday I’ll write a love letter
to Rosalind Elsie Franklin, like the ones
strewn about my bedroom,
where I tell her about my day
and ask if she would like to stir sugar
into tea with me
and call it a case study into romantics.
Now, pick your metaphor
and run with it, show me
how exactly you’re supposed
to be reading this.
And when you find the answer,
let me know.
Welcome to the beginning.

She plays mother,
wraps a scarf around her neck.

Red, once,
a proclamation of this,
of who she is.

In her letters,
she writes of little strong hands
taking her
up and up to the end of the world,
the breathlessness
of love, in which she thought,
and afterwards wrote,
and afterwards danced.

The world takes her
and she paints her neck
with something beautiful;
there’s a lot here
about getting to the roots
of it all.

And from this,
something grows.
Something, now, is cultivated
in the passive tense,
and then poets flock to her,
their little strong hands
grasping against her neck
for a taste of the bruises
and the colours.

But she is a spiral in herself,
a coil waiting to snap,
she is the roots of it all.
And the world wants
what the world wants;
to dig it all up
and plant something acceptable.

Still,
the silkworm woman
will not yield,
caught in the effervescence
of spider webs and champagne
she sings,
she shouts,
opens her mouth,
and silence pours out
of the wound.

Picture it:
one of us is foaming at the mouth.
Who really cares what the other is doing?
Because the spotlight
hangs like a noose against the overdose;
oh, how beautiful and pale white
one of us will soon be.

Flashback, one hour,
laughter plucking the chords
behind our tongues,
spitting slick
bouncing off the walls
of the tour bus.

Forward, one year;
I turn twenty. One day
I will catch up to you.
Minus five days, I sink
and think, god,
did they ever bury you
without the lights on?

I know. I don’t need
it explaining to me
that the inevitable takes us all
one day, that of addiction,
that gaunt-white
Dickensian phantom,
comes to claim back
the transactions.

Only,
it was never like that.
I never knew you,
and there was no danger
of losing my own spotlight
to your noose.

I’ll just go, now,
and pick up a repeat prescription.
I’m talking to nobody.

You said it yourself.

I think of you, and I think of sirens
But not of shipwrecks. Of lighthouses
But not of dark shores. Sometimes, I
Think so much that it hurts,
And then I stop thinking.

I think of you, and I think of sunshine
But not of night. Of the moon
But not of the tides. Sometimes, I
Want to sit by the ocean
And swallow it whole,
And then I stop crying.

I think of you. I think of you.
I see the world,
And I think of you.

I’d been too busy so much of the time,
that the requiem between one and another sunrise
seemed to be far too full of birdsong.
(a love song to the insomniacs of the world,
awake a million times over,
and a million times again for the sleepless
and the sick, world-weary passengers closing,
briefly, their tired eyes against the window of the Earth.)

Let’s say that the whole world is asleep
all at once. Seven and a half billion exhales,
seven and a half billion crumpled duvets
and grasping dream-hands, landing soft blows
against the mattress. What are they dreaming of?
Let’s say that they’re all dreaming of the same thing -
of the apocalypse, a kaleidoscope of little deaths
stretched out across the expanse of a dream.

Time, in dreams, is elongated; stretched out
like the pull of thick cornflour. A person —
any person, can live a thousand lives
in the space just above the nose,
where the eyes don’t meet and the dream wrinkles
the creases of age on the brow. Upon waking,
everyone will be a little bit older, and the great, catastrophic,
unreal World-Ender will fall asleep, a little out of time
with everyone else. The clocks strike into action
again. Just like in the dreams of a thousand lives,
except this time, my feet hit the ground.

there is a collection of beautiful things
on the street at three in the morning.
i know this because i am one of them;
tomorrow, i will be human again,
but tonight, i am divine. tonight,
i am the beer bottle rattling, unbroken,
sea-glass against the cobblestone.
i have been seen and been consumed,
which, at three in the morning
(in a collection of beautiful things on the street)
is the human experience. to live, divine—
or something like that.

so, meet me in the neon lights.
where am i? look into them as if the sun,
and find apollo. there i'll be.

We were dying of thirst,
clamouring amongst each other
to lick the spit of women
like mothers’ milk,
we cried out, begging
for resolution,
for water in the drought.

Our lives were shattered,
children screaming
for the since-dried milk
of nourishment,
women sobbing upon
small corpses.

God, we cried.

And then you came,
a gift amongst the flint;
we had long since found fire
but you taught us
how to put it out.

It ached in the milk-light
of our bones,
a flowing stream
and tablets carved
of testaments,
of commandments
that spoke
of how we were destroying
the earth,
how repentance
is simply not enough.

And god, we cried,
we cleansed our sins,
and we cried
for water,
and you brought it to us.

Legs spread,
Mother Mary holding
women close,
the only sacrament
worthy of sacrifice.
Men falling in useless battles,
and women bringing water
to the dead.

We found a stream.
We drank.

Mother Mary sunk wide,
and god, we drank.

First-class lipstick,
like satin,
gently marking into history
sign-offs and signatures,
transcending boundaries
between land and ocean.

Nothing unwritten;
everything perfected
in the sweet subtlety
of marking names
and millions of ways
to say the same sentiment,
sealed up below the deck.

Traversing the sea,
unread letters wait
in the salt and the sediment,
that will soon wash over them;
the timelessness of tragedy –
of waters that lap
over delicate bodies on beachline shores.

These same elements,
clinging to life
within seawater-stained envelopes
find themselves
just a little too much,
almost a second out of time
with the world outside the ocean.

Now, timelessness has moved on,
and many ships have fallen since,
but there remains
a pocket of air,
huddled in the North Atlantic,
where love letters still muse
with writers’ delicate bones
and the sweet serenade of saltwater.

I’m feeling the air on the thick of my tongue,
and it’s summertime -
it’s summertime, now, and I think it’s a Sunday,
so I’m going to smoke that Cuban cigar
in the quiet, against the sunlight.

I’m going to wait until the sun comes down,
and then the light is all mine to drink in;
not one, but millions of stars share the glory.
I’m blinking it in, like this will be forever,
and there’s something in me that wonders
why I’ve waited so long to live.
Why I always let the light filter
through stained glass,
and why I believed them when they told me
that staring directly at the sun
would blind me in forgiveness.

Why does forgiveness have to hurt?

I’m wondering if I can ever forgive myself
by kissing switchblades
and licking the flames from votive candles,
or if there must be an easier way
to do all of this.
But if I cling too much to what happiness could be,
then I’ll never know how to forgive myself
for not having it sooner;
they want me to live a good life,
but I am steeped in sin
and waiting to burn.

This - this thing -
is far too much about what they want.
Far too much against
Cuban cigars and Sunday mornings
in bed, and grabbing hold of life
with fists and hair and saying
“take this, all of you,
and roll with it.”

I’m paving my own narrative,
looking at barefoot beachfront walks
like altars, and I know -
I ate the fruit, and now I know,
that a long line of commercialism
will fool you into thinking
that the light at the end of the tunnel
means something.

Take off your hands
like a shop window mannequin
and give them to me;
let me imagine that it’s you
sleeping on the other side of the bed.

Your hands
and mine.

Let me let you
feel the bridge of my nose
and run your hands over
the scar on my elbow,
the mole on my chin
to make it yours
even when I’m holding you holding me.

Tell me it’ll always be this easy;
this gentle;
this much led by the me
that’s leading you.
Let me use your hands
to call you
so I can use your *******
to tell you that I hate it
when you don’t answer.

Make your hands puppet master
and let me hold them;
as they contort me
into however I think they think
they want me to be.

And then let them
fall into bed with me
as I sleep,
holding your cold hand
in a double bed;
painfully aware
of the blistering, dry
burn of always being
alone.

I wake up and you are still here.
You, of course, being something I can't touch,
a feeling, maybe. A high school crush on forever.
You, of course, are not really a you, but an us,
something I can't touch; a promise
to someone, of something. What it is about
I can't remember. What it is all about I can never
remember.

You are filled with every good day I've ever had
and every good day I never will. Your body bursts
with all the things I didn't get to do
because I was lying in bed, or crying in the shower,
or scared of what strangers would think of me.
When you smile, your teeth bare courage, click-clacking
with the memories of speeding down the highway and turning down
an invitation to a very, very quiet concert.

I can't tear myself into two neat pieces to hate and love you all the same,
I want to pick the meat off the bones and take all the parts I'm grateful for,
leaving you a skeleton carcass that gloats about everything that passed me by.
You, though, are not a meal and I am not a vulture.
I cannot separate the memento from the mori
which, still, leaves me with two choices.
Pretend none of it ever happened,
or accept the whole impossibly beautiful, unimaginably ugly thing.

quite honestly, i don’t want you to remember this.
i don’t want you to finish reading and think man,
at least i’m not that pathetic,
you know? if i can make you feel better
about your own life, then great,
i’ll take it, but god, please don’t remember
me after you’re done.

i think that people exist when they’re thought about.
if it was that easy to blink out of existence,
i’d erase my name from every government database
and, i don’t know, go and live on an island
until i got eaten by sharks.

actually, let’s talk about that instead. sharks.
everyone’s scared of them since jaws
came out, but statistically they ****
one person every two years. that’s 0.5
people a year; half a person dying.
i’ve killed more people than that in stories.

but hollywood thought “hey, let’s make the big scary
shark into the villain”, and everyone said “okay”
and ate it up with big wild teeth
and now people don’t swim in shallow waters
because their shadows look like seals.

i wonder if someone made a movie about me.
‘the big scary sad life of never leaving your room’,
because people cross the street when i notice them
cross the street,
so it’s only a matter of time before i join
the barracks of some statistic, too.

Arch your fingers, clasp your palm,
touch the keys as if pulling
at the heartstrings of a lover;
back in the looming financial crash of 2007
when a family bought a piano
and a new house,
and a young girl ached Chopin.

With your hand out of the window
and the car on the motorway,
talon hands, poised,
feel the air as a shotput;
smooth, round, permanent - oxygen bubbles
puppeteering pale fingertips
until the window goes up
and the radio is heard again.

Speaking three languages,
la mort, la mort, la mort;
D – E – A – D
the keys cannot spell ‘childhood’,
but her fingers reach
more than an octave now
(her thumb still ******).

Chopin welcomes her
to her final decomposition;
her piano, dusty
and blooming with flowers
through each key,
plays discords
that don’t quite make
a funeral march.

i look at the sky and i love you.
it's pink and purple and maroon and yellow.
and i think oh
how beautiful is that?

you're walking down streets
that i don't walk down.
you're living a life;
and i'm logging onto my phone
to tell you how well you're doing.

(we're miles away.)

but isn't that just so wonderful?
i see a sky you haven't seen
and i send it to you. (think of you.)
you show me a love
from miles away.

i breathe. (in, out.)
and i think
oh, how beautiful
to be loved from a distance.
but you're close.
you see me, you're close and far
and oh, i see it. how close you are.

i look at the sky and i am loved.
let it always be pink.
let it always be purple.
let it always be maroon.
let it always be yellow.
let it always be,
until we meet,
and find patterns of friendship in the clouds.

until then, my best friend.
until then.
(i'll smile as i wait.)

the sky will be beautiful.

Welcome to the council of Jezebel,
here are your sisters, your not-quite nuns
who tell you of false modesty,
and how easy it is to strip yourself to the bone.
You’ll be staying here for a long time
because nobody else wants you -
that’s okay, we’ll teach you how to want you
without manipulation or coercion.

We meet on Saturday nights,
and there’s all the red wine you can drink,
you can gorge yourself on bread
and we’ll call the act of gaining weight beautiful;
we’ll teach you that it’s self-preservation
to deny desirability for fulfilment.

You have your own room in this cloister,
and you’ll never have to sleep on the floor again.
We have a library, and a soft workshop
where you can take apart all of your broken pieces
and learn that you’re not a machine
and can live without them.

If you want to leave, you may,
but nobody has ever done that
so we’re not sure how to deal with regression,
but we do not fear it -
we never fear what we do not understand
because we are feminine beings designed to learn.

The council has no rules - we live free,
no leaves covering our bodies as shameful.
We paint each other using berries and apples,
and at night, when all of the stars have nowhere to guide us,
we sing like free mockingbirds,
revelling in the liberty of what we have to ridicule.

It’s always been enough to wear the same cardigan for comfort,
This old red chenille one I bought at the wholesale store when I was 15.
It’s funny—it never came with memories, but it has them with me.
I ripped a little hole in the crochet links more than once, bumping into corners and getting it caught on chairs;
I think I’ve always been getting caught on chairs. Snagging my best laid plans on what it means to be a person, wearing a cardigan, but,
It still sits in the back of my closet, in one piece.

I remember wearing it when I needed comfort. When comfort wouldn’t come. When comfort was a love letter delivered to the wrong address. When I read something that wasn’t mine, and became mine nonetheless, in worn out crochet. I should have thrown it out years ago, but it’s mine,
Tattered and torn and sitting in the back of my closet because I’m too afraid the next time I wear it will be the last before it rips completely.

I, on the other hand, have already ripped completely.
Because I could only stay in the closet for 19 years.
I miss that red chenille cardigan. It was there when I was there, in the closet, being me when I shouldn’t have been me,
And it stayed at home when I left for somewhere I thought was better.

I visit my parents. I suppose I still live there, in part, with that red cardigan.
Stuffed into a space that’s small but safe,
The way plants grow withered but tall without sunlight
Or the way I ended up so independent I became lonely.

I define loneliness by how well it wears a red cardigan.
I judge it by how much the snags and small unravelings stick out;
I love it for that. For the sticking out. For the unravelled yarn in place of my tangled emotions,
For the staples that I put in it because I didn’t know how to sew.
My mother could have taught me how to sew, but I exist in a whirlwind of quick fingers and dropped stitches,
And my woman’s place is not the same as hers.

I wish she’d taught me how to make flapjacks, how to repair cardigans, how to love a man;
I wish she hadn’t taught me that my father loved me.
I wish my father had seen an old cardigan and thought of repairs, instead of the old donation box it could be thrown into,
But he was never the type to try and fix things anyway.

I’ll fix his mistakes. I will keep that cardigan, that old thing,
And I will not repair the imperfections that have given it character.
What am I but a red chenille cardigan? Held onto but never worn?
What am I if not something to be contained at the broken seams in hopes that I can preserve myself longer?

So, I am preserved. A fossil. An old relic of Pompeii, frozen in ash, wearing a cardigan that I don’t really fit into anymore,
A wash of red amongst the black and grey wreckage;
Oh, how I have a home in the wreckage. How I am a cardigan atop the ashes.
It doesn’t flutter. There’s no wind to carry it.

In another life, I’d be the wind. But we’ve already established the story, haven’t we? I’m the cardigan.
I’m nothing but thread that’s woven itself into something of minor importance at best.
So, here I am. Minor importance. Worn cardigan. Here I am, wearing it all. Can you see it yet?
It’s riddled with holes, but still in one piece.

sorry. i know i’m supposed to start at the beginning
but i don’t really know when that was. sorry,
there’s something in your mouth. what was that fairy
tale about all the teeth? no, wait, that’s not the one;
there was… woods? maybe. i don’t remember. i
never had one of those big books of fairy tales
as a kid. i had a forest, though, and an imagination,
and something to run away from. and milk teeth. sorry,
i had milk teeth, how small your milk teeth are!
is that the beginning? if it is, let’s not start there let’s -
let’s start somewhere else. like the middle. the part
with alleyways and drug deals and i thought you were
the story i was searching for. turns out you’re something,
for sure, but if we start with that then we’ll start with feelings
and that’s what good poetry is about. and this isn’t good
poetry. this is an incomprehensible stream of anxiety
medication and being someone else so - so which part
am i supposed to play? i don’t have a red cape but the wolf
doesn’t have milk teeth. am i the one in the bed? does
that make me dead? i can’t finish this. maybe i should start at the
end.

Ambrosia makes you a man, Apollo,
And to me, bring forth the ancient sunrise;
Go! You go, and ever shall I follow,
One man in your eternal light disguised.
Too short a time I have borrowed for you,
And from you, forever a single breath;
Your honey-thick glory mine to pursue,
Chased and captured, birthright to timely death.
Those Biblical tales I shall now forsake,
For no God but yourself shall e’er be prayed;
Angels—I shun them; their eyes I unmake,
I look unto you, and be not afraid.
Do not grieve for me: I will not be gone,
My Apollo, I will be in the dawn.

i've always liked space.
the idea of exploring
the final frontier; beyond
and into everything.
when i was in university
i wanted to be an astronaut
with a literature degree—
i thought hey,
why take maths and science
up there, but not language?
not poetry?
it's all well and good if we meet aliens,
but what will they know of us
without first knowing how we love?
i would bring a book of love poems
to the extra-terrestrials
and explain that the finest human condition
is one of devotion.
science got us upwards,
but love gave us the idea.

i'll never be an astronaut.
i think some people are destined
to become the dust that made us;
that shaped us. some of us
are our mother's children,
born on earth to die here too,
but we dream. what are we
if not made of dreams?

at night, i look at the moon.
sometimes, it is so big and full
that my heart swells with it.
my chest bursts like i've stepped
into the light of a space station
without a space suit.
that tiny little moment before death,
in which i am one with the universe,
and it makes me so small.

but, oh. out—
out into the glow of a thousand suns.
little poet in the wide universe,
loving his way upwards.
loving someone so much
that he understands
what it feels like to take
such a great leap.

with her, i know the stars.

i grieve the girl in the summer dress in late may,
i grieve the mourning doves,
i grieve the ice lolly stained teeth and the way the sun was hotter in 2005,
i grieve the dew on the grass that stuck to paddling pool legs.

i attended the funeral of a little girl
when i decided to no longer be one.
i attended the funeral of summer
sometime last november, a little
closed casket affair for something i had to freeze
in the morgue before i was ready to let go.

i mourn the tired christmases and birthdays
and the excitement of the night before.
i mourn clothes set out on bedroom floors
and perfectly-made outfits for school trips.
i mourn the entirety of primary school
and wonder if the rainbow fish works a corporate job now.

i lost my faith somewhere between the pews
of my holy communion, but i got a pretty
green set of rosary beads and a bouncy castle
and an episode of doctor who so terrifying
that i made my eldest sister sleep in my room.
i lost my other sister, with whom i talk to now on tired
christmases and birthdays, just after
she spent all afternoon completing game achievements
that my young hands and daylight-savings-attention-span
couldn’t achieve by themselves.

when i was younger, i was smaller
but the stars were closer.
when i was younger, i was barriered in suncream
and each swimming pool at a caravan resort
was the ocean in a friendly disguise.
when i was younger, i lived
a lunchables life with soft serve ice cream for dessert
every day, and it was far too beautiful
to be beautiful in anything but hindsight.

now, i check myself for wrinkles;
it’s the only time i can look in the mirror.
sometimes i see her, five or seventeen,
and i say “that’s my girl.”
i cannot let her know of the mourning that will come.
i cannot let her claim me as her future
but i will hold her soft, small palms
and pretend that i am doing the leading.

i don't think i'm getting better
but i'm drinking oat milk again.
it's the stuff my parents buy,
rich and creamy, and it doesn't
have the aftertaste of thick curdle.
and, i mean, i'm still listening to mitski,
but it's strawberry blond, not nobody,
which is equally sad when you read into it –
except i'm trying not to read into things any more.

i got a degree in reading into things
from the same university wherein i walked
the unfamiliar city streets at three in the morning,
looking for a suitable canal to drown myself in.
it was all dropping rocks to test the depth,
hands stuffed in my bright yellow raincoat pockets,
van gogh quotes and 11am seminars
and "i don't really want to die thirsty, maybe i should just

go home, you know?"

but i did that. three years of it, and i went home
to a not-quite home. that's what my parents say.
"what time are you home?" and "aren't you glad to be home?"
except for me, home isn't a four bedroom in warrington.
it's not even a seven bedroom (or, as we had it, six-bedroom-and-one-unusued-gym-room) in lancaster. it's...

well, that's the thing, isn't it?
what is home?
it's certainly not a dairy substitute.
although, i suppose, i'd rather drown in swirls of oat
than swirls of lactose. my parents say i've always been quirky like that.

me. quirky little girl from warrington.

Four clocks on the wall,
telling me that I’m running out of time.
There’s only me in this ghost-town,
keeper of the hands,
and I have to reset each clock
before it develops a mind
of its own.

The problem arises in that I
am flawed, and slow,
and by the time I have reset
the fourth clock,
the first is taunting me
to run back and start it all over
again.

And what’s worse?
I can no longer tell
whether I have been at this
for hours, days, months, even.
My Hell-shackles are the very thing
I am trying to push back.
I could call it a prison
of my own creation,
but I wouldn’t want to plagiarise God.

I’m having a lot of waking dreams,
like I’m hypnotised. Sometimes,
I hear voices telling me what to do
in catastrophising extremes. Set
back the clocks, or you will die one day.
Set back the clocks. Set back the clocks.
Set back the c—

i see things in high definition colour, but
july is the only month that fluctuates—
between florida orange and, later, burnt sienna;
everything between the 1st to the 31st
is dipped in a honey-glaze of three things:
1. warm, sticky air
2. the feeling of 6pm
3. bicycles riding through fields of fireflies.

naturally, i spend most of july in my bedroom—
the heat gets to me, makes my allergies flare
and i watch movies; old, 80s, movies (or—tiktok clips
of the same movie, only broken up into thirty-six parts
that i view from my bed with my naked legs spinning vertical circles through the air).

i always forget the feeling of august
until it’s there again. july
overshadows it with the final embers, so i only realise
it's august on maybe the 5th or 6th. almost
a full week into a month that my brain—
which is never wrong about the way things feel—
sees a deep, ocean blue.

i don't write home about august. i don't hurry it up
through winter months, when i begin the countdown
to hot, hazy days. if anything, i view august
as the ending of something, of a summer i wished so hard for.

and every time, it blindsides me with love.

i love things more in august. i love the smell of summer-
rain on the pavement. i love songs i listened to in january.
i love waiting around for halloween. i love my bedroom,
the pause of heat-sick sleep, the blue-sky mornings.

i write love letters to autumn in a time capsule. i text july and ask u up?, and wyd?, and come over?

and still, when summer ends, i will never want to get what i wish for.

two men at the water.
you've all heard the puzzle, right?
you have three wolves and three sheep
and you need to cross a river.
(any river. let's call it—
oh, i don't know. the baptismal
jordan.)

okay, so it's a little different.
one sheep who doesn't follow the crowd
and one wolf in the skin of his dead brother.
it still works, doesn't it?
(especially if they're in love.
let's say they're in love,
just for the sake of it.
let's let them be in love.)

if the sheep leaves the wolf behind
it's only because he was chasing the sun.
let's not blame him for chasing
the sun. let's make a terrible joke
about another son, and a father,
and a fire/sacrifice.
(let's put the sheep on the altar
and see how we can bleed him
for the machinations of another.)

let's give the wolf some big sad eyes
and a failed career
and a bad relationship with his family.
let's give him a longing
for teeth and blood but let's make him
only long for his own.
(let's string him up and get him to dance
for us. let's point and look and laugh
at the stupid little apex predator
cowering at the world.)

where were we?
oh, right. baptism.
well, that's an easy one, isn't it?
call up the sun,
and burn it—
burn it? are you sure?
yes. he's sure. so we're sure,
aren't we?
(but isn't that a rebirth?
can you baptise a phoenix?)

(no. but isn't it world class
entertainment to watch the flames
turn to ash
right beside the water?)

oh, terrible person;
oh, woe is me, terrible
'person' for terrible acts
that were never committed
in the first place.

oh, second place,
welcome me. welcome
me? welcome 'person'
for uncommitted deeds
and false memories?
is it welcome? is it
welcome?

oh, honey. oh, darling.
oh, sweet sweet sinner
from catholic school
in the back seat of a fighter jet.
oh, military propaganda
for a life un-lived. oh,
song. oh, drown it out.
oh, performance.

oh, performance.

oh, beautiful girl.
oh, girl to be taken.
oh, girl to be used.
oh, girl, get used to it,
you'll be dealing with this
longer than it was dealt to you.
oh, girl, you'll be hurt
longer than the hurters. oh,
sweetheart, i forgive you because you
were young. but you are me,
so i also hate you.

oh, little one.
won't you grow up?
won't you be a failure
earlier than i was?
won't you give up
like i never did?
won't you hitch a breath
on a short prayer,
wish you never were
wish they never were
wish those things...

oh, those things.
wish they never were?

see, you're younger than me.
oh, you're so much younger than me.
wish they were never done;

see, twenty-three year olds
don't have fairy godmothers.
they have propranolol and therapists
and dialectical behaviour therapy forms
forgotten to be filled in.
oh, forgotten.
oh, stone slabs with no meaning.
oh, stonehenge.
oh, mythology.

be an anthropologist, my love.
curl up your grief
and your trauma
and work it into a pretty clay sculpture.
oh, sweetie, make it beautiful
please
make it beautiful. make it
loved, or just make it.
let it be finished
and loved
and long-lasting
and then die.

oh, and then die.

listen to music.
sink into music.
be music,
be beautiful,
be consumed.

you are what was done to you.
after all,
oh, after all,
you are what was done to you.

you are what was done?

you are done.

Soft skin, marred,
jagged cheekbones
cutting into blank white;
suffocating plastic sweats
against the mouth of the thing.

A moth-swarm of faces,
of sickly hospital white
plastic; mouths gasping
for air and everyone drinking spirits
like the world is about to end.

The façade of a masquerade,
pearl whites with jagged oysters
creaking underneath, all botox
and sloppily revisited youth;
death is passed as a disease.

One within, too prideful
for a mask, yet pale faced
enough to spend the night
in the quagmire and relive
the quicksand underfoot forever.

Hard, wrinkled women
ruining themselves,
asphyxiating slowly in the crushing
pressure of plastic on sweat on skin
right down to the bone.

Still, the white-wind, bare, ghost
lingers in the after-party,
picking up the discarded masks
with smooth, youthful fingers;
resignedly exhaling down into sinking earth.

A virus is like a secret,
once it’s out, it’s out.
Like, hey, don’t tell anyone,
but I’m gay, and I have blood
in my lungs. I’m trying to choke
the gay out of myself
before anyone else can. You
see, it’s all about control:
needing it, and taking it,
and the in-between state
of having complete control
and spiralling out of it at the same time.

So if I want to find a vaccine
for all the bad thoughts I’m having
about myself, isn’t that just another
way of saying that I’m trying to make myself
immune to hatred from outside?
If it originates in the lungs,
in the mind, in the sickly body,
then it’s somehow more authentic.

And maybe I can deal with it
a little better. Only a little,
because I’m still one-hand-pinned
against the wall, choking myself
to the point that I can’t form words,
can’t say the things I’m desperately
trying to adjust to.

Herod’s fingers taste
of earthquakes, of disaster,
of the spit of the woman
he liked before me.

Potiphar’s coins ring
in my ears, on my fingers,
a pile of gold to drown
my splayed body in.

The two men play poker,
and I am the bargaining chip,
for their straight flush,
ashamed and disinterested.

Herod will not fold,
his pride venomous
against his meaty chest,
all wiry hairs and “I dare you”s.

Potiphar raises the stakes
with a flash of gold tooth,
and drags his finger along his neck,
slender and elongated.

The guillotine already feels familiar,
as the rules are plucked
like fresh grapes
or the only rotten part of the fig.

Herod beckons me forth
to look at his cards;
“yes,” I say,
“you are ruthless.”

Potiphar snatches me, now,
and I see his hand,
“yes,” I say,
“you are wise.”

Both men want something.
A prize to rip open
and sink their gluttonous lips into
like they do not know Daniel.

I want out of this room,
the sticky heat of summer
is beginning to upset
the restless lions.

that night, i wore a polo shirt.
i thought hey, i'm going to a friend's
dorm, no need to dress up, right?
so i wore a polo shirt, a yellow and blue and pink
thing. i'd bought it from a charity shop
only weeks earlier, when i was still exploring
a new university town
and finding not-so-hidden gems;
and sure, it was three sizes too big
but it was comfortable, and made me feel safe.

turns out, you didn't care about polo shirts
or tank tops. you cared about what was underneath
and i was drunk enough to let you - or,
well, not really let you, but i didn't need to dress up
so i wore baggy clothes and a smile
so i had half a bottle of jack daniels
and i had a nineteen year old point to prove
and i had a pill that you gave me
and i had - sorry, have - a therapist's bill.

but this isn't about you. i don't write about you.
i make a point of not writing about you,
actually. which is to say that i write about you
in a way that doesn't let you hurt me anymore.
i write about what i was wearing
(did i deserve it? in my 1970s male t-shirt?)
or what i was drinking
(it was university)
or how i tried to throw myself into a river
in the aftermath
(but i didn't, because i got thirsty, and i didn't
want to die thirsty, so i went home).
no, i'm writing about the polo shirt i was wearing.

cotton, i think. polyester, probably.
the amazing technicolour haze of am i sober enough for this?
who knows how many iterations
of the same lancaster charity shop
it circled through, old men with families
and wives and kids -
it probably saw birthdays and christmases
and, safely tucked in the back of a closet,
shielded itself from the almost-crisis of cuban missiles.

and then, me. a nineteen year old
branching out into the world for the first time;
a lover of poetry, maker of music, naïve and beautiful.
then, it was just a polo shirt, and i wore it
as long as it was laundered, for a month or so,
until december. not that i stopped wearing it
because it was cold. it just reminded me of hands
and hands and hands and
****, how many hands can a man have?
how long will i have to feel them?

i didn't shower the day after, just slept.
a hangover, right? just a hangover.
and then, when the hot water in my dorm
daily ticked on, i washed every inch of myself
to get rid of you, and your foam banana shower gel
that your mother probably told you to buy.

so, what compensation do you owe me?
what price should i put on things?
you touch it, so you pay for it.
one charity shop shirt, three pounds please.

I imagine how soft the hands must have been
to crush supple, christened grapes into wine,
and I sip for longer, staring down the Deacon;
avert my eyes from the wrinkles that find
some hand between, a drop of wine on the palm,
pushing the lifeless red to lips, mine.

With the wood of the pews touching bare thigh
and someone either side of me, I pray, silently,
for the ghosts of the Vestal Virgins who were, too,
boxed into Heavenly pastures, to come and sing,
with cherry-wine mouths, that Hell will be most glorious.

I wish women were priests, and think of how tempting
it must have been for Eve to find gentleness
when Adam touched his remaining ribs - the beauty
of self, she must have eaten an abundance of fruits
grown from male seed, before the apple speaks of tenderness,
of the mirror that shows herself. The cruelty of the snake
burns, and Hell bleeds as punishment for unwritten crime.

But how beautiful it is, to think that God exists!
To think of him lying dead, splayed out,
or perhaps curdling into spoiled milk, festering
in the fetal position, plumes of Papal smoke
encompassing his body, the smell of stale cigarettes
and spilled wine, and a congregation chorus-echo of Last Rites.

I have never been sure how to worship, only the imperative
of the verb - to worship - to allow God to enter wherever he pleases
and to leave wildly, like horses trampling across northern grass.
I have known for as long as I have held privy to thought
that my body is not my own, I must open the gateway to my vessel
and let him free me from sin; Lord, help me,
but I keep finding God in the eyes of a woman.

Finding her at a crossroads is like finding myself in the dark,
forbidden, and the easiest thing my hands have ever led me to do,
except I can no longer recall whether any hymns sung of Eve;
temptation crowns her legacy and we remain treated this way,
like grapes, and there is power beyond omnipotence in accepting
that if we are going to be crushed, we may as well hitch our last breaths
on the lips of women, praying, eternally, for God’s eyes
to have been burned out by his own, masculine light.

i go through the hollow days
until the first drop of alcohol hits my tongue;
and then, the choice. the concerned mother,
the train-track rumbling stomach, the
"you can't drink any more unless you eat something."

i want to say it's my life. i want to say
that drinking on an empty stomach is far
more cost effective and that i'm here to go
the distance. it's enough for the first
few hours to laugh it off, until the house is closed
up and the oven is on, on, on.

really, it's not my fault. my dad's a chef. i'm human
and i know i'll die if i chastity-lock my lips forever, it's just...
well, there's something in it. there's something
perfect about "no thanks, i'm not hungry,"
like the smiling hollow is earthquake-rumbling:
"yes, yes, yes, one day you will die small."

oh, ****, i'm so full of love it's spilling out of me
like bullet wounds, like i've been court martialed,
like i'm the pinpoint of a broken sheet of glass,
the part from which everything else shatters;
of course i'm the centre of the universe,
who else would be? who else could love this way,
fierce and terrible and hating? who else other than me
could break the universe for another chance at hello
or at two thousand and nineteen?

which isn't to say i'm manic. which isn't to say
that i don't cry in the shower and scream in the car.
i do. but when i do, i'm the main event;
nobody booked tickets to see anybody but me here.
don't kid yourself, world. don't make me laugh.
don't act like everything is okay when i'm breaking the baby-bird bones
of my fingers every time someone else talks.
me, the human stress ball.

me, twenty stories tall and universe-filled with love,
nothing else can even come close. i'm ******* godzilla,
i'm interplanetary, i'm that giant ******* marshmallow man
from ghostbusters getting shot at by the heroes.
maybe there's just too much of me to love the way i need
to be loved; completely, obsessively, like an illness.

oh, god, i want to be loved like i'm sick.
not just another hospital bed but the whole **** ward
all for me. all eyes on me. nobody looking anywhere but me
and oh, please, i'm fine, really,
i don't need all this attention.

like i'm daring the world to divert it away.

a birthday list of gifts:
- a fifth of whiskey
- a gun with one bullet
- the attention that people get from the crowd below before they jump off a building

i don't think i'm asking for too much here.
i feel like i'm one of those unlucky ******* born on christmas day
who get half the presents for twice the occasion.
how cruel must god be to birth me anywhere but eden,
into a world where other people exist,
where we have jobs and say hello to store cashiers and divide up our attention like slices of mandarin.

so where's this revolution i ordered?
where are the people making me important?
i need a cause to lead and a muzzle for my heart,
and i'll burn on and out,
not like a star, but like the end of the ******* universe itself.

and here i am, acting like i matter
when i really only want to matter to you.
i don't care how you want me to revolve
as long as i'm a lone moon. as long as the tides
are all mine; see, it's a lot more complex
than me playing easy villain or anti hero. it's not
been about me this entire time.

but i can't write poems about any other subject.

i can live without my feet. i can live
without anything that makes me carry on;
carry this pretty sweat of life on my hunched back.
every day i wake up and there's a new ache,
a new heartbreak to write about in the diary i burned when i was 17;

when i was sweeter and lighter and thought that drowning would be a nice way to die.

i listen to music to fall asleep,
until i get to the point between waking and the good stuff
when i slam my laptop shut and my brain says
right, now it's time to imagine you're dying, and everyone cares,
everyone is at your funeral wishing they were nicer to you when you cried over chicken breast and were in a whirlwind relationship with iced coffee.

sometimes i guess it's easier to pour the leftover ice from last night's gin and tonics into coffee. sometimes it's best to leave poems unfinished.

Do we want to make it out of this alive?
Was that ever the plan? –
When we called each other beautiful,
and our friends laughed
because we were perfect for each other
but I wasn’t made for you.

Do you want me to live through this?
Even after all of this,
being read, being spoken,
I do not understand the role I seem to play.

Can you shed some light on my purpose?
Right now, it seems,
I’m only good to tell you stories
from another girl
who doesn’t hold a knife to her hair
in the drunken night-time.

Is there still something to cut off?
Look at me, asking you,
shouting up to the pedestal
I built, myself.
What would you like for breakfast?
What sacrifice would you like today?
Don’t say ‘nothing’;
it seems I am only good
to cook you blood-pudding
and pretend that I am talking
to someone singular.

Will you take another hit? –
Or is this one all mine?
It’s another Tuesday afternoon,
again, and we’re in the
limelight milk-light
and you’re somehow every girl
I’ve ever loved
but I don’t want to kiss you
because you, and she, and I
are not as real as the stories
I tell.

there’s two forests that i’ve committed to memory.

one:
if i want to see the ghost of my seventeen year old self,
i’ll have to buy another bottle of citrus *****
and prepare my soft skin for mosquito bites
as i, drunk and free, roll around in the dirt,
still believing that my life has not yet begun.
i’ll **** behind bushes, with only hand sanitiser and leaves
to cover my body, like a modern-eve.
shivelight will sink onto my body,
my laughter conjuring up ageless forest-spirits.
my friends, also drunk and free, will make promises
that we’ll come back here one day,
that we’ll be like this forever;
we’ll never wrinkle and we’ll never age,
but our lives have not yet begun.

two:
i’ll consider myself wise beyond my years,
bu still young. still having the time
that i beg to be a virtue. still working out
where i want my line breaks to be
if i want to conjure percy shelley’s ghost
and change myself to fit a romantic ideal.
the only system i can break is to skip class
to skip stones into the river in the forest,
thinking of the girl i think i love, the girl i think i hate,
and all of the parts within myself that are mutable
and yet have not changed. i’m seventeen, and i have time.
i have time, and i don’t believe that i will ever run out of it,
even though each hour in this forest is spent
and will not return, i will convince myself
that i am merely solidifying a bank of nostalgia
that will make me smile one day.

i am crying, now.
i will **** myself when i get my first grey hair.

Samson rips me limb from limb,
and I thank him, because God
gave him this power, and who am I,
lowly and lonely, to question
what flowing hair sinks beneath my body
as I commit myself to some kind of ending?

Then I am watching from below,
eternally reaching upwards, asking
for some recognition from either side;
which will claim me for their own?
Purgatory is a too-small coffin
for the only one who is neither good nor bad.

Samson steps over my body,
and I shudder in ecstasy,
perhaps to love a man was to destroy myself,
but false pleasure speaks testament
to how simple it would be
to pluck the hairs from his head.

Above me, Heaven song;
below me, Hell song.
Neither God nor the Devil will admit
that they are brothers singing in harmony,
and nobody will believe
the only person who can hear it.

And then I am in love with Delilah,
and how she did what no man could;
Samson was not flayed in battle,
but taken down whilst he slept
in his conceited neglect of the fact
that it was a woman who led Adam to bite.

Still, I am dead,
and Samson is not joining me.
His soul has been claimed by side unknown,
and here I lie,
coffin-sick and wondering
which direction I should wave my white flag.

Five.
There’s a lump on my breast that I haven’t told the doctor about.
I told my mum, and she said it was probably fine, so it’s probably
fine, even if my friends tell me to stop chancing it and see a specialist.
Sometimes I try to pop it like a blister or a spot, but it just stings
and then Google tells me that cancer is more of a dull ache, so it’s fine.

Four.
I threw up violently in the bathroom and then my heart felt heavy.
Ignoring the obvious irony of ‘heavy’, I could describe it as:
tight, aching, dull, wheezing, like a fist clenched right around it.
Convincing myself that I was having an elongated, stretched-out
heart attack, I took myself to the hospital.
They gave me acid reflux pills.

Three.
When I was seventeen, I was as seventeen as a seventeen year old can get.
That is to say, my problems were both numerous and the end of the world.
So it surprised exactly nobody, least of all the police officers that were called,
when I took a scalpel and tried to perform surgery on myself. Yeah —
that happened. But at least I got to ride in a police car
on the way to tell the crisis team that everything was really okay, I promise.

Two.
Osteoporosis runs in my family. Like the lamest curse that can possibly
be passed down through female lineage, it’s a given truth that one day,
my bones will become brittle and break. To this day, I haven’t lost my bone-
breaking virginity, and I personally think it ***** to be twenty-one
and have never had the opportunity to get a cast signed. I drink a lot of milk.

One.
To this day, I have a fear of home invasion. I suppose I’m more attuned
to the house-settling noises of being alone. If I’ve made a habit of ignoring
all my own bone creaks, they’ll start popping up in other places.
Like knocking on a door that’s already open. Like the way the bed creaks
when I turn over. Like checking the locks when something is already inside.

i forget things half the time
and i forget that i’ve forgotten even more;
i think maybe part of my brain
decided, once, that i’m still young
and i have to make more room
for anything good. i’m dreaming
and that’s good, i don’t know why but,
well, there’s always a little split second
before i wake up where i’m not anything.
i’m not awake, or asleep, just lying
in the sweat of a thick winter duvet,
and i feel like half a person, half the time
but that moment before everything sets in
is a little pocket of happiness,
where i’m not me and those things were never done.

Copy yourself,
make something other
a binary you,
in a world
of starships and code
and the fact that death
doesn’t really mean anything here.

Right here,
we don’t need
oxygen or food,
in this world
of falsity and fantasy
and the sweetness of hallucination
that aches behind your body.
Stand still,
headset firmly on
and breaths calm,
a new world awaits your better self
where you forget the depersonalisation
of still always being human.

Copy that,
you’re the captain
of false starships,
hurtling through uncertainty
with virtual reality comforting
you when you realise that
you’ll never be like this.

Another you,
version fifty-three
in a chain,
never changing yourself
or becoming something better
only sticking in mistakes
and pretending like it’s improvement.

Copy yourself,
make another other
for another self,
forget your body
and transmit human signals
to other fake-people
who tell themselves aching stories

of a reality
that we daren’t change.

I’m calling a ******* line
and telling them that I don’t think
my first girlfriend ever loved me.
They ask me what I’m wearing,
trying to divert the conversation,
and I ask if emotional baggage counts.
I push a hand between my dry thighs
and ask them if they like their job.
I ask what their favourite flavour
of ice cream is, and if they’ve ever
eaten it in the sunshine and felt okay.
I ask if they have someone back at home
that they’re doing this for,
or if they just like monetising a soft voice.
You have a very nice voice, I say,
and they laugh, awkwardly. Kindly,
they ask if I meant to call the Samaritans instead.
I say no, they blocked my number,
and they expect me to be killing myself every time.
Are you killing yourself now?
Slowly. Do you have a boyfriend?
No, baby, I’m all yours.
Don’t lie.
I have a baby on the way. I’m just trying
to make ends meet.
I get it. Me too. By the way,
do you even like ice cream?
Not really.
Me neither. I don’t know why I brought that up
in the first place. Are you lonely?
Right now?
Yeah. Now.
A little bit.
I am killing myself, by the way. I just wanted
to talk to someone before I go.
That’s okay. Your call will be charged anyway.

i have started to see my life
in shades of pink.
these days, it's all sunsets
and grapefruits
and a little extra blush
on a summer evening.

my life has never been
pink before. i have hit every pixel
on the colour wheel,
but never pink. never
smoked salmon mornings
and raspberries for lunch
and cranberry lemonade.
never happy; now happy.

one day soon, my life will be purple
as usual. close to blue,
closer to red, hitting the sweet
spot and resting there. close
to pink. closest to pink.
one day, when mania is over
and summer evenings
become autumn afternoons,
i will keep the pink in my pocket
and carry it everywhere.

They were making Jesus into a marionette.
That’s why they nailed through his hands,
because the hands are attached to the arms,
and the arms the shoulders, and from there
you can pretty much control the whole body.

It’s too easy, far too on the nose
to pretend that God is the puppet master,
and I don’t want to give any credit
to the executioners. So, let’s say
that Jesus is both puppet and puppeteer:

right. You following me?
Hands are being manipulated by hands,
and I’m trying to get at something
beyond a religion I don’t believe in any more.
The ****** lamb is in his ****** chamber
and there’s something controlling all of this.

Unreality is the only thing
that can, for sure, be real. If we’re all
in a collective simulation,
made up amoebas floating around
in some brain hooked up to wires,
then why did we invent God?

The body peels itself
away from the floorboards,
sweat, sticky and slick,
pops like a gunshot
as the skin pulls loose.

Shoulder blades pulsate
as movement returns
once more. “It’s been
a hell of a night,”
the heavy arms creak.

Even in the dark of the room,
the body can sense morning;
the dew on the legs, the cool
floorboards are warming
with the dawn.

There’s something here
about a beginning.
The body
pulls at the skin
and it is still attached —

Meaning, of course,
that the body is a body
once more. Meaning,
of course, that the beginning
has already begun.

The foot of my bed
(where the duvet, entangled in dreams,
holds me hostage between the legs)
is slick with something cool.
Something cold — stark contrast
to the sweat winking amongst leg hair —
caresses, allows airflow to de-stagnate
the locked-in night breath.

She is all eyes and hands
in all the wrong places, long fingers
separating human from other.
Her voice coos like honey
and I am bound to mattress, shivering.

If this were a hotel, there may be a Bible
in the bedside drawer, but I would rather clutch
something else. This is home,
and with no choice but to welcome the night,
I release the dust from under my fingernails,
blessed spit holy between milk thigh.

I have heard tales of angels,
women of fire whose voices, un-silenced,
make ears bleed. I am no stranger
to blood.

The first plague that sunk into us told us how to see red,
the anger, either alien or overfamiliar, turned inwards
into our stomachs, acidic and bubbling until we choked
on the waters, and still we begged the Nile
for relief, ******* salt from our tears.

And then there was discomfort, slipping into our beds at night.
The women, familiar with the dissimilarity of abject slime
merely sighed in the expectation of their husbands,
but the sensation screamed of newness to the men, and they ran.

When lice came, we scratched ourselves raw and there was redness again,
until the streets were serenaded by shrieks, and long fingernails became fitting
for women who sewed new clothes when the others ripped theirs apart.

The wild animals were like old friends who tore apart already broken bodies;
this was the time that the women sang each other to sleep,
all we could do was offer meek comfort to each other,
telling stories of how this would never have happened
were it not for the pride that never touched us.

Women worried when pestilence came, unforgiving and without discrimination
to our livestock; without food, we starved ourselves intentionally,
hoping with fragile limbs that there would never be enough meat
on our bodies to substitute for sustenance.

Pained enough, we thought we were used to it when our bodies turned against us,
without anger this time, only vile sores that burst in the dead of night;
we soothed each other’s wounds, our hands familiar with battle scars
and hoped that it would be enough.

The end of days could not come faster than when the fire rained down on us.
Some brave women, tired of being sacrifices, ran towards the flames,
either weary and half-finished already, or aching to find a burning bush
through which salvation may lie for those who did no wrong.

An attack on our senses droned into nothingness as locusts fell,
their bodies used to punish us, a concept of which we wept for,
we knew intimately, and sobbed not for the chess board
but for the pawns who must always fall first.

It was strange, how much darkness felt like reprieve,
in those three liminal days where our songs were unburdened
and rang free across the devastated plains;
oh, those days we sang so loudly that it was almost over.
They were almost free, and we were almost able to go back
to how we were different before.

But tragedy seeps slowly in the night on the burning wings of angels,
and our firstborns were stolen.
I, still young, did not bear the grief of mothers, but I was the third child.
It’s harder to be going than to be gone.

I want to say please don’t leave,
I still have your coat in my wardrobe
and it looks like you can’t have gone far,
and please don’t leave, I don’t know
where else I’m supposed to stay
when it’s two in the morning
and everything feels like communion,
and please don’t leave, I am having to confront
how selfish I am.

So you’re leaving, and I’m trying to work out
if I should pack my memories into little boxes
and pretend that you’ve died, and you’re leaving
so I’m on the floor in my bedroom thinking
about going somewhere and trying to find Judas
or at least a tree with sturdy branches and the end
of a rainbow with thirty silver coins as compensation.

And now you’ve left, or at least made the decision
to leave, and here I am again trying to wave you off
with images in my mind of the Titanic leaving behind
everyone who couldn’t afford to die so grandly;
you’ve left, and I’m using metaphors to talk about this
because it’s easier than genuflecting and joining
a faceless pew - sorry, don’t think I’m calling myself Jesus
because I’m not. Really, I’m not. But you’ve left,
so don’t I have the right to call myself what I want?

It’s not like you’re here to stop me. There’s that word,
gone,
like it’s final, like you’ve joined the laundry list
of everyone who said they’d be there forever. You’re gone,
and I’m promising myself that I’ll stop being addicted
to people, only cigarettes and cheap wine and the feeling
of missing something when it isn’t quite packed up
into all of the final moving boxes just yet.

I don’t think I know how to be sad properly.
I’d find sadness even in the middle of the dark,
even when I’m not searching for it,
but it’s not the Van Gogh type of sadness
that will gain me posthumous love.

More like, every poem I can write
is another draft of a suicide note
addressed to the tiles of the bathroom floor.
I’m struggling, sure, but I’m not struggling
in a way that’s accessible. I can’t be
processed and eaten,
my bones have no use for the Other.

But it means something to me,
it has to, otherwise why am I
doing any of this at all? I’m familiar
with red to the point of orange,
but nothing beyond that. There’s not
really — no, not at all — anything
except a cry for help in these words.

when dogs bite people, they put them down.
it’s sad, isn’t it? that we punish the animalistic
in the animals and let it run wild in the predators.
you, in the forest, you, lying down next to me,
and i hold something in my hands but it’s cold,
now, like the corpse of a dead rabbit caught in a trap.
the foxes are salivating but i won’t hand this over.
a dog bit you the other day and you bit it back.
i hated you for that. the foxes are whining
and i yelp back, wounded, bitten.
you scream too because you like your voice
against the night. you’re an animal. you
open me up and play doctor and the moonlight
glints across your yellow teeth.
your fingernails paw across my chest
and they’re perfectly sharpened. you make
me wait for it. you made this world,
and now you’re bored.
i’m wondering whether you
got to tear into something so sweet
ever again.

It’s a June-hot part of May
and I’m in a swimming pool,
head underwater,
and the whole world is filtered
through chlorine.
I try to open my eyes
without them stinging
but the burn slicks my eyelids
back, like a doll I had as a child
when my stubby fingers would push
sight into those glassy eyes.

At the bottom of the water
my back hits cool tile,
and I only know which way is up
when I exhale some of the precious air
and watch the bubbles blink
out of existence at the surface.
I wonder if I, too, will become
something intangible once I
reach the land again, but I cannot stay
down here forever.

I know about drowning.
I have read many poems about people
who wave death in like an old friend
and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Perhaps we all end up
in a swimming pool, one way
or another. I’m just at the bottom of mine,
seeing in my mid-twenties in a haze
of unconscious sleep.
If there’s something that’s going to jolt
me out of summer adolescence
then it may as well be CPR,
but for now, I can sink,
like I am not the dead body,
but the boulder weighing it down.