seven and serpentine
i’d recline on the green couch, on peeling patches of fabric held by white string. […]
in spite of everything, your hands
still in my hair still unscrewing the bottle of oil open still ringed with gold staining green your hands memorising the backs of my ears think of your hands folding sheets think of your hands cutting tomatoes i think of your hands smacking the comb against my temples when
Afterthought
In another time my tongue has learnt to trace around the syllables of your laughter. You will forgive my blush, forgive the sameness of my body to yours: both small-breasted, bleeding. In afternoons, your fingers press miso into vegetables; the light scurries into my hands, a ti
Fragmented at Best
It is a strange day when Classics Twitter unites. Yes, you read that correctly: a subsection of the notoriously polemical app is given to the study of the Ancient World, dedicated to joking about the tragedians and assessing the new Pericles reference à la Johnson. What Classics Twitter does best,
Amen
Amen tastes like church cookies: crumbly, stale, hauled out of cardboard boxes, old man’s fingers with popping blue veins beat her to the chocolate ones. She is always surprised when she remembers Sundays in this golden haze, edged in maroon, the smell of mahogany – She breaks off the memory li
Charoset
not ch like chocolate / the kind of ch that gets stuck in the back of the throat & stops you from crying / the kind you throw together once a year / but like the moon it never sets / and stays behind & washes up / i wonder how many miles per hour […]
Iphigenia in Jaywick / The Aftermath
I grew up under stained-glass windows, learnt their blues and pomegranate-reds before my mouth figured out how to form words – I was never good with names, but the faces stuck. One stood looking over the pew our family always sat in, Eve and Adam, her hair the same russet-gold as the apple she hel
My grandmother’s hands
In a fading photograph, they sit一双手Newly-wed still. They pause,hovering in a chant of numbers wavering into silence, and words slipout of reach 一粒, 两粒, 渐渐溜走like grains of rice through parted fingersuntil cupped hands left almost barrenwait only to receive a voice: it