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