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Afresh

Like the opening chords of Siamese Dream
        Or John Coltrane’s celestial high C

I ate ice cream with Kooja in a pre-Columbian tomb
        Dropped acid like Pikachu in a onesie on a full moon

Makes my heart explode
        This sweet lilac road

So many new gods
        Not even heaven can hold



Look up —

        and hallucinate the pressed
flesh of the night, new moons falling
straight into the water. And when you’re
       under, kick your feet — and say yes,
please
— your skin slipping off like
steam. And when you’re out, pull my arms
round your goosebump shoulders, our soaked
clothes left dumbfounded in the sand. And let us
        grow, like lilies in the cove
of our lost bodies, caught up
in your crazy hair, like dolphin nets of our own
making. You said the heart is a musical
drowned and resuscitated on a beach, and
        the moon: a lost bottle, last-ditch flung
into the deep. But let us
remember it like this: awash and offered up
and unseen — our reflection, just two
colours merging into the prism
of the sea.



Your body
        of water

After Ocean Vuong

I was careful with your hands — held the dusk
to my lips and didn’t speak, mute like a
lake. Those hands that could hold a blade
to my neck, cut a gentle river of
sap, bringing the night some honey.
This isn’t a protest and this isn’t a rescue flare between
my lips. It’s just, if we leave anything behind, can we let it be our
gaze, holding each other witness, casting our shadows
onto the sky? — you turning off the torch, the moon draining.



Leaving—
        Mexico, 2017

the church music answered for us on the porch
that night

            my childhood looking down from the sky / too many
questions in its gloomless eyes
           
                   did the earth move or were we just always stumbling?

        you looked at me once with every inch of your body / and for a time

    even my childhood lay down inside me / sucking its thumb / as if the sky
wasn’t already falling

                the night was kissed by that music from the church / always that music /
it’s funny the things you miss

                          but the power of a torch song is less in its music more in the softness
of the light / and you’d never know

                                    you’d never know sat there that in the morning it’d be clouds
of migrating birds painting their exit songs onto the shining day

                                            and could you wish for anything more?

                            could you look up at the moon and ask for anything more than a mouthful
of air and a body / sat there on the porch breathing / hugging your grazed knees
tight to your chest

                breathing and waiting for the dawn to break into its unlikely glory and its
continuous circles of always-leaving light