“and it is all so clear, and everything is liminal
but i'm okay with that!
i am finally so so happy
and i love you and love you and love you,”
a tied tongue loosely mumbles my first name
and then the call drops out.

under a daze, i gather a
stranger’s hair back behind her ears.
her dainty neck cups her head,
and hangs it over the gutter.
she is beautiful and blind
and wreaking of daffodils
and spearmint
but her voice sings of ginger beer.
she acts numb to her ****** knee
dripping on the pavement in gloops.
but she looks right through me,
her arms hover around my neck
“oh, thank you!! i love you!!!”
she doesn’t know my name but
she speaks tenderly
from an acidic tongue,
and wipes her mouth,
on the sleeve of my denim jacket
and staggers back into the hall.

i see an animal at the centre of the road,
it’s leg bone white and pure,
to protrude out from torn brindle,
waiting for the midday sun.

heartache
for the blood smeared
cue ball.

the announcer
singles me out,
knowing my middle name

[rhymes with decay].

and any day now
i will win something.

the announcer laughs;

says my body
is the dumbest corpse
he's ever seen.

i wrote you
a letter every day
letters to tell you
just how i feel

written in neat, curved
writing i told you
just how sweet
i thought you were
how you made my heart
glow

letters in which i wrote
with various colors of ink
pouring out my whole being
to you

i wrote you
a letter every day.

i wrote you letters in which
i told you how you made me
bloom.

eventually
i found myself
pressing harder on
the paper
than i had before.

creating tears in them
similar in shape
and size
as the ones
inside of me.

i began to send
letters
with creases
and bumps
and stains
splattered with tears

pouring
from my eyes

as i wrote
the anger
bubbling within me.

my last letter
addressed to you
contained
no words

but was blank.
because
i had none that

could reach
as far

and deep

into the cracks
of my
heart

to describe
just
what you

had left
of me.

the weight of my mind is polar
orange and viscous.
its fragility hangs in a gentle orbit,
gathering dust,
rubbing dully against my inner skull
- an object of my deepest desire.

but wide eyes gazed at you
amongst the black
through the kitchen window.
the house on the hill,
the blue door.
take off your shoes when you come.
i have needed you for twenty years.
but

i was not present when he intruded,
underneath my clothes.
but you were.
but it was gentle, a touch like a closed fist
but clamped, fumbling.
but
his love called his number, to no answer
a single, white noise -
the static after he says his own name.

her father told me
she laid in lavender fields.
a light breeze in 1989 carried from
winter, through to spring.
“oh! the allergy,
it set in her skin”, he said
like dried violet paint
- boiling on the pavement.
the purest blur of sunlight.

as a child i stole
old photo albums
that contained the musk of
her youth.
cupping them in my arms.
the fear of being robbed of something
that i never understood.

i remember her
and her sisters in a straight line
six shoulder blades kissing
cement ridges in brick walls.
aunt melissa painted lions,
the surface of the moon,
sticky fingers on chalky black canvas.
until her body gave up in 1995,
her two frozen lungs.

at age four
my younger brother dressed,
in different shades of green.
laying on his stomach amongst wet lawn.
its stains transferred transparently
as a mark of irrelevancy.

mother checks everything twice,
three times,
before leaving the house,
that has never burnt down,
and never could.

father lives as half his age,
in the backyard,
underneath a mound
of damaged tin sheets.
injecting himself with something
that will never be uttered -
“not under this roof”.

at age twenty
in the house on a hill,
alone on the kitchen bench,
with two bare feet in the sink.
i peer out for
that naked yellow hue.
i grasp at it until it becomes tangible.
the tangerine dust in my throat.
the impossibility of it.

i exist
as three personas
buying fast-fashion with money
that i will never have.
five pumps of perfume
coat my paper-thin flesh -
that smells the way sunshine feels.
gold coconut coated ringlets
bounce
from my pointed collar bones
- perfectly.

tomorrow i will thrift second-hand things.
the makeup of another stained
on the lips of old t-shirts
and i’ll adorn
rusted, gold-plated rings.
i won’t wash my hair,
and i’ll swim in the river
like free emily -
beautiful and brave.
and i’ll read ‘monkey grip’
for the eighth time
- shamelessly.

at night i’m in europe,
alone in a small, sea-side village
called a name that i will never pronounce.
i’ll wear hand-made sundresses
and lay bare-breasted on rooftops.
i don’t speak their language,
but they probably speak mine
- effortlessly.