izzy

The mountain lions can’t see from here that it’s too late. They are standing on this little outcrop of rocks, patting the ground with the pads of their feet and craning their necks to see. Squinting into the distance, all they can see is a tunnel of smoke which means nothing to them. Even the mountain lions can’t hear sirens or engines or screams or the thunder of cracking wood. Even the mountain lions can’t see the little black specks moving away from the tunnel of smoke. There is the smell of burning but again, this means nothing. The burning will not reach up the mountain for them. Another smell on the air – deer. White-tailed deer on the other side of this rocky outcrop. This is a smell that means something. The stalk, dash, slash and a throaty growl as the deer hits the ground, kicking the air as its eyes roll back white. Dusk is blazing red tonight. The cubs feed and the mountain lions lick the blood off each other’s fur.

*

sarah

I looked over when you started to moan
Panting like you’d run a race
Eyes still closed, breath catching

hey, hey, I’ve got you. what’s wrong?
crushing the baby
whose baby?
some relation to Michael Jackson
what happened?
he crushed the baby
who did?
my dad
how did he crush the baby?
he was sleeping, he didn’t know it was there
whose baby was it?
Michael Jackson’s baby

You frowned, pressed your nose into my chest, sighed
Drifted back off to dreaming
I thought of the last one (the child of a friend)
And its manner of going (crushed under a car)
And wondered how many children would have to die in your sleep
Before your brain finally reached whatever point it was making

*

izzy

It wasn’t an easy choice, exactly, but the cancer meds were expensive and you said you didn’t want to lose your hair. I shaved mine off anyway, but I agreed with you and it was just to look badass. I spent hours at the printers, looking at different paper stock and embossed covers while you scouted locations in South America and put together a team. I wrote my Great Australian Novel or something like it while you filmed an epic across three countries. Then we swapped spots. Your novel was like nothing I’ve ever read, but I like to think my film had a bit more…je ne sais quois. I penned an opera while you photographed nuclear fallout zones. I designed a line of menswear while you produced your first album. You designed the stage for our tour where I burnt the mic with my rhythm and rhyme. You designed and built a gallery to house our work, with a secret tomb beneath. I scratched poetry into the walls. The sculpture island was last, even though I’d never tried my hand at so much as a pottery mug. We designed it together but with our own sense of style. It was almost like each half of the island was in opposition to the other, but magnetically attached. When visitors walk down the path in the middle of the island, they will be struck by the weird beauty of our design and our clashing colour schemes. When they reach the jetty on the other side of the island, ready to leave, they will have to pass through the one sculpture that joins the two sides, they will have to clamber over the fingers of these two massive and tangled hands.

*

sarah

I stood with a camera round my neck
And you said ‘sit. stay. stay. no, sit. sit. stay. bone? sit. bone? sit. stay. sit. sit. bone? sit.’
And the marbly black dog at your feet whined and fretted
I watched as her floppy wet brain tried to process the fact
That never in her four-legged life had her paws ever set foot on paper
And as trust and mistrust collided behind her eyes
With you wheeling overhead like a great breasted gull
I watched as certainty fled her small world
And all the power cut out

*

izzy

I watch her cut right down to the bone, sliding the meat off, and it seems weird to me that depending on how you cook it, flesh will either bind tighter and cling to the bones and the tendons or just fall away like the pieces never fit together in the first place. Her cuffs are rolled and a tendril of hair trails across her eyes, narrowed in concentration. I watch her eyes dissect the leg in front of her. It’s like she can see it at every stage of life. See this leg flexing and tensing and kicking up dirt, see it jerk with the last spark of life and then hung on a hook with the skin cut off. She slides the back of her wrist across her forehead, pushing the hair back, still holding the knife and her eyes glint. Slivers of flesh shiver on my plate and Marcy kicks my leg under the table but I don’t wince this time and I don’t dob. I pour gravy over everything and it looks glorious. Just the way I like it.

*

sarah

As we hissed along the licorice strap asphalt with me at the wheel
You took it upon yourself to tell me the story of the universe
From scratch
And just when you’d got to the fishes evolving
We swept out of the tiny blinking towns and into open country
And as the night showed us both what dark really meant
I thought, shuddering, of the millions of years of boiling black waves
And the endless lidless, gaping inhabitants within
Flashing white as a nightmare through the deep down dark sea
Until the eons threw out a scaly, finned sacrifice
The world’s first thing to flop its way onto land
And lie, gasping, staring, dazzled and wondrous, at the sun

*

izzy

‘Chopsticks’ emanates from underneath one of the cairns by the pony track, echoing across Ben Nevis, and you are ripping the rocks back with your bare hands, getting dirt under your fingernails, scraping your knuckles red raw and white on the grey stones. Rubble flies in all directions, I duck and crouch on my hands and knees. I look up the slope and watch your shoulders roll and heave under your coat. There is a small inland sea between your shoulder blades and I want to press my palm into it and lick the salt. Finally, there is a corner showing. Flaking varnish and rotting wood that looks like it has been flayed. ‘Look!’ you shout, ‘Look!’ and I am, I’m looking at the space you have made in the cairn, this hole in the side of the tallest mountain in the UK and ‘chopsticks’ is still belting insistently out of the ground and there is the corner of a piano down amongst the rocks and you are beaming and waving your arms in circles like a crazed jazz ballet dancer and your face sparkles in the white sun. I skid up to where you are, I get down on my hands and knees and dig with you and you laugh and say something like, ‘this can’t be happening’ but it is. This is really happening and it’s happening to us on the day that we decided to walk with our lungs breaking to look at the light and the rolls of green from on top of this mountain. You’re making little excited huffing noises and your breath is billowing into the cold air like you’re trying to make clouds. All I can think is that this wouldn’t happen with anyone else. I feel brave and reckless uncovering this piano that is playing ‘chopsticks’ under a cairn on Ben Nevis. I think that it’s stupid to think that this couldn’t happen with anyone else. That of course I feel that way, because when you love someone nothing is ever the same as it is with them. That one day when you don’t love them any more or you fall in love with someone else or you don’t you realise you were just two humans. I feel weird about wanting things from you sometimes, or maybe just about wanting so many unnameable things. I think things would just be easier if I wasn’t trying to hold every moment so tightly in my hands. Then we are pulling the last rocks away and uncovering this wreck of a baby grand with its keys grinning at us like teeth and we are grinning too and you’re hugging my neck and kissing my face with a pressure like pressing palms in the smack of a really good high five and I think, ‘fuck easier’, this is happening now. I think it’s enough, it’s more than enough just to be two humans. To be these two humans on the side of a mountain with a rotting baby grand and hands to hold onto it. We take a climbing rope from your backpack and push the piano down the mountain before us, holding the rope together to make sure it doesn’t go careening into the trees. The other walkers look at us with wonder and confusion and respect and we are gleaming with sweat and laughing with ‘chopsticks’ ringing out into the crisp air.

*

sarah

Lobsters live forever, my love
If they’re lucky, if they’re wily
So take my hand, we’ll buy a shell
We’ll sell the Mazda, we’ll take to the sea
And see where the waves take us

*

izzy

the best is when you tell me we are all made of stars
all of us are made of bits of other things, we are all everything
it explains the supernova happening inside my ribcage

*

sarah

Somewhere between Summer’s burbling starry-eyed earnestness
And Winter’s avalanching frosty stares and silent recriminations
Autumn has crept in with a party hat on, and is standing quietly
In the corner of the room, waiting to be announced

*

izzy

slick pavement, these shining live silver scales
making the streetlights shy, hiding behind hands
shadows breathe around corners and in doorways

the moon pushes back the clouds, clamouring to see
as the concrete cracks and opens its maw –
why does cracking concrete always remind me of teeth? –
leaves crumple and drop like brown paper bags
the ground swells with wet dirt and rotting tree-flesh

I walk in quiet and calm and the damp dark holds my hand
folding me back into this stricken soil as the cold rolls in

*

sarah

Sarah’s poem today is in audio form, and is shamelessly inspired by the ‘Poims’ of Sandy Nicholson, who you should check out on the Youtubes because he is magnificent.

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