you find a costume
for your sticky
skin, for
the club and last light to travel in
your eyes, red like
lasers for the camera
love in those
explosions, of people
colour laughter hot white
flashes and rainbow lights, love in
tangles of sweat and hair
you’re laughing all over, sometimes
you forget to smile in a picture
you’re drunk on everything, or just not sober
maybe you don’t
remember how you get
home.
someone is next to you, sleep
twitching. and you wonder about
love like that in everyone, tired
but still dancing.

the challenge: write a poem in five minutes using ‘ode’, ‘water’, ’shortage’, in a house that was barely occupied and (obviously) in a neighbourhood that woke up to water shortage one morning.

(a freewrite on broken communication, silence, expectations)

let’s make ghosts
to live in our mute minutes
remix old laughter for their howls
and in the jagged roads of our gaze
we’ll think we see them over the glare
and wonder where the good
ones always vanish to

-

The black notebooks I’ve piled up are secrets, sometimes even to myself. The boys would’ve never shut up if they found them. Too many. Blasting a dark corridor fluorescent to a million doors, a fucking playground’s worth of bad dreams and memory. I hate that I find memory lanes right when I’m furthest from; I’ve been packing up again, I’m moving, I’m getting out. And I’m all ready.

So it happens again. They are in the bottom-most drawer. I find them. I stay up all night. I go through the black. As one would expect, the clock turns backwards, stubble plunges back into my skin like arrows, my lungs turn a radiant technicolour, anything else you can think of.

Here it comes, and your eyes awake from sleep. You’ve done it several times. In the very first notebook, as it was,

Man, I am so nervous! I didn’t know why she invited me over. Will there be anyone else? I hope I don’t get lost—

revisited over and over,

I remember she asked me if I had kissed anyone before. She asked it like she was going to check if I was a liar. I wanted to think it but I didn’t—

again and again, bookmarks between my lives in all that black, one for every time it happened again, and now it comes to this. The very last book, where

You crack the dark wide open.
How many times have I tried to say it?
First kisses are bad but this wasn’t yours, it was mine, and your kisses were spiked with laughs full of light. Contagious, luminous. Made all heat in my stratosphere ignite. I had mints; atoms that lost themselves between us. You grab fistfuls of all bad love movies I recall as kid genius, distill them from my hair and press them to my face. Rub it in, with that lightning rod at the tip of your nose. You whispered I have marmalade in the kitchen. It was the sexiest thing I the naive could think of at that age, to mix my favourite foods with you. For you to bite my lip to the symphony of boys writhing in their sleep shorts all across the state. The most gorgeous girl they could never have. While you, you fit into my palms just perfect. I don’t know why. I was hideous.
But you, you decided to touch me first.

I always hate reading myself. But it’s a bridge to cross, to the only you that I want to remember. Not who you are today, who you lost it to, the names of your children, where you sleep, who you belong to, or that you will never sleep next to me ever again, not even when we marry the earth.