How does the night take away the face of the world?
The speaker thinks how wonderful it would be
to have a cigarette, a secret pinched
between thumb and index like a dash of salt.
Happy to be alone with this thought, to leave it un-uttered.
The speaker watches the dying light web
her fingers into wings. Her reader hovers,
impervious to her insistent plausible deniability.
“I” is the strain between letters, the undoing of sight.
The eyes of angels crowd the speaker’s periphery.
She holds her breath, feeling them, then insisting
she doesn’t feel a thing. Her hypothetical audience,
all-knowing and querying. They are not fools, they see
behind the curtain, the inscrutable “I”.
The speaker shuts her eyes, inhales cool, unlit air.
She wants to smoke a cigarette in a bed with a lover
on a night like this, faces shrouded in the same blue, a halo
hovering around their shared mischief.
Orange stretches over the blue room.
Angels in every corner listen to the speaker’s every thought
about wings and heat and smoke.
There is no escaping the cold “I” of morning.
She pretends not to notice and searches for a pen.
Yarn
I carry a ball of yarn within me,
an attachment I can’t name.
It tumbles, collects my softness.
When it catches on my sharp edges,
I feel its tension, wriggle
inside myself to free it.
I fancy its tendril crawling
through my corridor, down to a place
reachable by index finger and by tongue.
Now, I tug at its viscous spine,
coax its curled tail, this animal hair,
twist its frayed trim
around my thumb
and pull.
My breath possesses the beat
of the dragging thing, coiled in it
lessons in passing and passed down,
from the forfeiture of girlhood.
I’m accustomed to carrying its weight,
warmed by my womb, softening
and slipping from me.
Pieces of me exit with it,
pale vermilion wisps turn to burnt sienna,
murky and ferocious and irresistible.
Something I am supposed to abandon
but never wanted to, this loss is shameful.
I cramp and ache when it’s gone.
I try to sew a replica of my love’s favourite shirt
I trace edges with a pin,
stains covered with
apology and questions
pressed into folds.
we will be in the same
room tonight held too
close, singe my arm,
impatient with the iron.
out of view,
my wound bobbin
turns with you.
I have been careless
with my wanting,
I stop the fraying
tuck the winding hem.
you ask, so I use
pearly thread
poking through seas
of cool brown.
there will be no trace,
a secret between
layers of thread. have you
been careful with
your words? do you
think before you reach
for my cheek?
shoulder and throat
carved into cotton
overlock the sleeves.
my hands sprout over
my head, careful not to
bend and suffer pin pricks.
blood runs to my shoulders,
I’m not sure it’s right.
the whir of the machine
carries and my concentrated
frown carry over the receiver.
there are parts of
myself: tunnel vision,
perpetual worry,
wretched desire unravelled,
then stitched back
into place. where is the line
between romantic and
ill fitting? I’ve spent weeks
on the phone, our frontier,
snipping loose threads, ripping
seams. no use in scrubbing
out the cost of time, I attach
buttons, unfurrow my brow,
another press, unclench my jaw.
Earth Rabbit
She is a Metal Sheep put to pasture.
She is rust in the company of pelt and hoof.
A Metal Sheep does not sing to the rain,
as the herd sings. The heft of her body astounds the shepherd,
laughs back as the snap of wind. The rain trickles
into her like secrets, tiptoes around her hinges
and reunites with cold sopping earth.
He is a Metal Rabbit under the brush.
Others have taken kindly to his stealth, canopied
and unflinching. There is hardly a difference between bravery
and aluminum, all rabbits know.
A Metal Rabbit’s patience is his body,
gears churning dutifully across time.
He is the colour of leaving, the keeper of this time
trotting on, across a narrow clearing.
I am an Earth Rabbit, made of my self.
I am the cost of good luck and the crust of the clearing.
Where I end my feet begin, never solid
enough to leave the womb.
The miracle of rain has come again, the mineral of my body,
tumbling under my saturation. I sink into my self
and hear the sounds of hooved angels singing me back
into my birth. There are forms I will not take,
strength I have not yet possessed. There is sulpher to my tongue.
Grief is a Furred Thing
(After E.D.)
Grief is a furred thing
whimpering under the desk.
Scruffy and matted, she pants
and gnaws at herself,
kicks fleas from her haunches.
Grief’s dutiful companion,
I indulge her.
Grief follows me, untethered,
begging to be fed.
I fall asleep to her sighs at the corner of the bed,
a cry escapes her sleep-locked jaw.
I hear Grief before I see her:
the scrape of claws behind the door.
I chuck a deflated soccer ball across the grass;
Grief sits and watches.
Leisure in my step today
when briefly delighted by my solitude.
Grief follows me still.
I pluck at the wiry hair
clinging to my jacket.
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