Friday 27 February 2015

diary entries

i.
write it out for your bad days. think out the knots in your spine and call me when your hands are done healing. call out to the birds and ask them to come back - send me a post card. we sat cross legged and found god, apparently, and your eyes were mine sitting in a different skull. i've never found the words to describe the feeling of complete ownership we had over each other. i don't need the words, but i want to hold your seventeen year old self's hand. i like where you live in my head never ageing.

ii.
i sat down to write out my bad days and my mind's eye flicked from a night time bus ride to a hug shared with a friend whose arms enveloped me and warm hands found the cool skin of my lower back, face to neck, ear to breath. i wanted to live in that moment forever. blood. i bled all over your hands that winter night with the rain outside and i thought we could have been in any century, blood of my blood, i snuck out in the morning. i dreamt of a constantly shifting landscape that i had to cross and i doubted my own strength, i woke to a body curled around mine and untangled myself to pass the time, i stood in the doorway and thought about all the lovers i've left sleeping, scampering out, anaemic weakness bleeding.

iii.
i dreamed you next to me again. i watched the shadows grow along the wall as time rolled past me like it always does. i watched the dusk circle in the orange light of i've-slept-all-day-again. i got up and wandered through the house, not my own, this time. i wandered through the halls and i wondered about my health and i thought about writing a letter but i didn't. i went back to bed and lay there listening to the sleeping breath of others and counted my own heartbeat. i rolled into oblivion and dreamt i was sappho, standing cliffs edge with last poem clasped to heart. the scene morphed into one of my own stories and i was the swimmer ready to dive. the room materialised around me and i dreamt that i woke up and walked out of the house, everything was crumbling to dust and the sky was a shocking blood red. i woke up for real and thought about calling my mum, i think she had a dream like that once.

Wednesday 25 February 2015

::figs::

// 
your baby is about as big as a fig,
the internet told me.
we used
to have fig trees.
they don’t work anymore.
my mum collected buckets
of figs – they sat
on the doorstep
fermenting. ‘i’m going to make jam,’
she would say,
but they’d fester and smell
and the guests would laugh
she’d say ‘shit, i better throw those things out.’

‘i’d kill for a fuckin’ big mac,’ said the girl,
showing me photos of her boyfriend
and her, standing on bondi beach.
tanned and glamorous
with neck tattoos
i said they both looked beautiful.
pleased with this,
she put her phone away,
and smiled at my stomach.

sometimes my dad
would express his disdain
as the plump fruit smacked the windscreen.
their sugary stains would have to be cleaned
before the juices hardened.
otherwise they’d become streaks like spit
that felt like toffee
and stuck like wax under fingernails.

sometimes i ate them (the figs)
with a spoon
in the same way you would eat a kiwi.
these days i eat kiwis
in the same way you would eat an apple.
it seems less wasteful,
how it all disappears.

last night, i became annoyed
at the shallow way my spacebar presses down
(cordial spill earlier in the evening, 
no one’s fault in particular)
i crammed my nails under the edge
and lifted to reveal its innards.
little organs of silver chips
lined
with golden markings.
how vulnerable it all is,
under there.

‘it has fingernails,
under there,’ 
she said, then the lady
called her name.
//