1.
it’s a monday night when your ma first tells you
that she never wanted to raise you catholic
and she’s sorry you had a breakdown
at the soft-mouthed age of twelve
but you have to understand
life is more complicated
than crooked teeth
and even tones

2.
on this day, in 2008: the sky was red
and you were very lonely

3.
your uncle smells of sweat and scotch and little secrets
the sun is shining and your blood swirls
a sea of brown, bubbling, tense
you cut your meat quietly
and
later,
throw up in the bathroom
with everything golden
everything burnt

4.
“you’re kidding,” she says,
ashy and freckled and too good to last,
and outside the rain falls
static in your chest
you say “no, really;”
her teeth have a gap
and you can feel
the smoke
stitched
into her breath
and

5.
“what?”

6.
there are flowers on your windowsill
in medias res: dying, never dead
and your bed is always cold
and your shoes don’t fit
and it’s alright to miss
the tears, if you want
but you don’t

7.
“oh.”

hey, wake up.
there’s that girl at the door for you again:
this time she’s got you a little cardboard box
full of withered browning poppies
straight from her garden;
rain-stained and trembling,
she’s got on the sourest of smiles.
she’s crowding your room with remains,
she’s teaching you self-preservation,
she loves you.

today, she’s knocking on your door
with the impatience of a devil;
yesterday, she’s holding your hand,
rolling the pads of her fingers
over every bump of your knuckles
complimenting your bone structure.
“when you die, give your body to science,”
she says, and you know that she means
‘give it to me’—you have already said yes
quite some time ago now.

today, you’re waking up,
you’re wondering the time,
you’re opening the door,
you’re saying hello i missed you.
it’s been fifteen hours.
you’re eating your heart out
and feeding her the scraps.
tomorrow, you're picking meat
from her teeth, just one little bird
that can't believe its luck.

she invites herself in, and you see
with a little stumbling delight
that she’s wearing those gloves you like,
oh, that soft old berry-red pair—
the ones that smell of ash and ink,
used matches and newspaper-print.
she peels them off her hands,
presses them into yours, and,
entirely shameless,
you grip them tight.

you savour their warmth,
you savour their feel.
you consider residual skin cells.
you consider honest infatuation.
neither of them seem to you
to be the truth and nothing but,
not quite, not wholly.
you love anatomy, you love her.
save the both of you some trouble
and don’t bother trying to choose.

she’s sitting on the edge of your bed
and she smells like old perfume
that wants to tell you it smells
like a summer day;
she’s kicking off her shoes,
she’s talking about cutting your hair:
where do you keep the scissors?
she’ll say she wants to paint your nails, too
but really she just wants to think
about tearing them out.

it’s hard to know but you think
you might want that too.
everything’s so complicated—
you just want to be beside her
so that’s where you are! now
she’s ******* crisp shrunken petals
right into your mouth. is she?
she’s got her nails on your lips either way.
you’re tasting nature at its end.
you’re just waiting to join it.

hey, wake up.

you’re the pink-dripped prints in the snow
of a wounded buck;
i’m the bullet in your back

you’re the little stories i was told
of prints on the shore;
i’ve forgotten the feel of sand in my toes

you’re the between of me and the moon
far too much to cross;
i’m burning so slow for you

you’re asking me to light your cigarettes
wires wormed below your skin;
i lean over the sheets towards you, and

you’re gripping your fingers tight in my hair
bones against a hospital bed;
i’m coming down, right down to the end.

in me there is a serpent longing
to crawl from my throat into the warmth
of your frame, and eat, and eat.
turn off the lights, please,
i say, and place one hand
on your own: too soft.

last night, all my joints
turned to ice—today, your spit
burns. i cough into the alcove
of your collarbone; sorry, you say,
as though you are not sure
why you say it at all.

on the couch you struggle
to fit all our parts together
and as you kick your legs
between mine, i begin
to work out exactly
how wrong this is.

a memory: holding you;
i am all heat and tremors,
meat and muscle,
interrupted breath.
but who can trust their mind
as well as they can their body?

i am hungry and tired and
falling to bits, an ugly affair,
the ugliest of all, and i cannot tell
if i mean it or not when i say
that i do not love you
anymore.

1: when i dream about you, i cannot see your face. you are made of light and glass, all your colour cast through a filter, like i could dissect the uncanny reality of your existence the same way i could the blueness of the ocean waters, or the gold of the sun; you have no breath, and your fingers are bent in all the wrong places, but you smell of cat's fur and you're warmer than summer air.

2: it always manages to creep up on me, even now. i'll be picking at the burn marks on my thigh and i'll start to wonder about the wine in your cellar; i'll find myself teary-eyed in the chalky grip of morning and i won't know why, so i'll simply suppose it's you again, coming round my room in the middle of the night, putting your hands on everything, dreaming the prints will poison me. i wish just the once i'd wake up.

3: so what if i miss you? haven't you ever cried for the demolition of a slaughterhouse?

4: well, it's just—i don't know who'll spill my blood now.

1.
it's a new year and you want to go hunting
so i peel off all my winter clothes
and consider the blessings
of mud on my feet and
you on my heels

2.
i pick all the first blooms of spring for you
and we swill them in scotch til summer
i'm shot through with bee-stings
but you're speaking with devils
and you've never been prettier

3.
i'm bearing revelation down the skin of my back
vertebrae like the tower, all down to bits
can't you see? our tongues don't fit
but i'm an altar of salt and water
beneath your stony weight

(4.
and in the shade of hypoxia
i am nothing, nothing but content)