izzy

Yr blood lips are like cherries
hot sour hit in my mouth
taking off

undercover security guard watching us
from behind a cleaners cart

don’t say bomb here,
don’t taste sweetness

sucking the pith of you,
turning you over to the sky
dropping to the floor like an avalanche of blossoms

*

sarah

There is such a space in me, and for the longest time I never knew it. One day, running my hands down the walls of my insides, I found a crack, felt a hiss of cold air. I spidered my hands until I found the latch, wrenched it open, stepped through. Felt the shock of finding an aircraft hangar in the back of the pantry. How vast it was. How full of quiet and sad and snow. White flakes sifted through the air like icing sugar, catching in spirals of wind, sighing as they settled to the crisp concrete earth. The keening of the wind, high up and far away. The aching rumble of aircraft taking off, felt rather than heard. The silence where the shrieks of birds should be, the high pitched whine where the lack of human chatter falls. And of course, when I turned around to the walls back home, they were gone. Nothing but white fading into white, nothingness blurring into nothing. The collapsing of self into self, the whisper-soft implosion of the lost and lonely mind. For the longest time, I clung to the sound of the planes taking off overhead, knew that where there was flight there were fliers and if I wandered far enough they would be there with smiles and sweaters and candlelight, laughing to welcome me home. I crunched through snow and drifting air, night bleeding into day as at the edge of the world, where the air gets thin and the stars get sharp. I bled into the wind. I strode through strange and wild places where the view never changed and the sounds never stopped. I walked out of my memories, the past shredding like sawdust in the sky. I walked out of my childhood, stepped out of my dreaming until all that was left was empty and longing. At the very edge of my own existence, I breathed out everything that I was as the planes roared past and it was then, with my feet stretched flat on the dead nothing ground that I realised that the roar was the roar of my own breath. Nothing greater or finer than the naked machines of my lungs. And there, deep inside, with my life shrieking above me in heavy high wind, with all the secrets ground down to the quick, I stood silent and sad and alone.

*