Anna

&
James
A year you said you’d wanted to get off.
For a year! I didn’t have a clue.
As if our nightly phone calls weren’t enough,
that first vacation, to show I wanted you.

2
Hifi smoking area, summer of first year

I’ll climb the stairs to meet that square of night

and watch you press a flame against your lips,
I’ll hold there now, knowing I could ignite
our whole history with just a few more steps.
But too many times the fire (instead of me)
you’d choose to start the engine of yourself,
to churn the seed of some catastrophe
that in your dream you’d buried in the tilth.
The rings you ploughed, they weren’t to purge the weeds
but, facing a soil infested, to let in air
for root-growth. No one gets to decide
on their crop, yet we live on the fruit it bears.
You guessed this even then, and your mistake
was not that you aimed to better your yield –
but terrified of your friend becoming sick
denied her proper access to your field
…A split seed prised in the tread of her boot
contaminates the land when she gets home,
sprouts, buds, flowers, then cross-pollinates
to meld with hers your monster chromosome…
All of life’s mutation James, let’s be real,

3
and you’re not engineering some dank GMO.
Let the bees caress, boy! Let breezes steal,
that of two crops a stronger one can grow.
I’m not saying you and I should bone
necessarily. Boning per-se’s not the point.
But I don’t know why we live our lives alone.
Or what else either one of us could want.

4
The butterfly house

It isn’t fair. But then it isn’t you

that’s doing it. At the butterfly house
each spring the butterflies are new.
Some rarer ones get fastened in a case
and taken to be relaxed come winter.
The kaleidoscope left with the heat off
falls like woozy ash to be swept into
black bags. This isn’t metaphorical stuff,
not really. It’s just how I feel right now.
Thinking of all the times I told you no.

5
Electricity

Mine was your back, yours my right hip.

When another lover would touch me there
I’d dumbly pray for his hand to slip
to my waist or my thigh or to lift into the air.
The humble earth of me, far away, ignorant,
absorbed any currents that started to flow
from your hypothalmous to your pants.
No resistance here. But benefits? Oh no.
Expending all that energy in absentia.
Have we just become too embarrassed to throw
that big scarlet switch that warns: I WANT YA?

6
Well entertain this thought. That all the others –
Emma, Sam, Ali, Dom, Jess –
saved you from me – and me, you – while we suffered
our desperate young demands for happiness.

7
Curtains

The curtains of my living room, I dreamed,

had hearts and little flowers in appliqué.
Needle-pricks of sunlight pierced the seams.
I smiled. But they were only making way
for fat drops of oil to push through.
Like sweat beading on a bald man’s neck,
on images of love each droplet grew,
bulging broad enough to form a slick,
the pretty symbols heavy-hung with black.
The curtain rod creaks. Two wood rings pop.
A gap and oil tumbles over the top.
I hold your hand. Had you been here before?
Again you’re gone and the window is a pour
of oil as sunlight from which I cannot wake.

8
I’m stuck – it’s stupid! – on how you could choose
that night on the lake to label me ‘pretty’ -
and how the ripples, bleached, fled from us
like the inhabitants of a city.

9
Lockdown

When I arrived I thought I wasn’t a girl

a boy like you (you boys with crews) would want.
[TOUCHES SIDE] Enough of a girl? Is this?
[INDICATES HER WINNING SMILE]
[SPEAKER HAS PAUSED HOLDING THE HEM
OF HER TOP, AS IF RECKONING CLOTH THAT

LET’S BE HONEST, SHE’S NEVER GOING TO BUY.

SHE ISN’T EVEN LOOKING AT IT BUT AT THE GAP

BETWEEN TWO FLOORBOARDS, THINKING

IS THAT THE LINE? OR ARE THE EDGES OF THE GAP

THE LINES? OR EVEN THE EDGES OF THE EDGES?]
I’ve tried and not tried and both were hard.
We used to say, let’s have kids at thirty,
and imagined how it would feel, our youth having gone,
to recall our joke-cum-promise ten years on.
Like digging up a time-capsule
and all they’ve put inside it is a mirror har har.
Joke. Cum. Promise. Sums it up.
Never could tell one from the others.
When I arrived I thought I wasn’t a girl.
Open a work email. Bounce my nephew on my knee.

10
You offered to drive and wave at me.
So nice. Next week would be better.
If we’re still single at thirty-five.
Nephew types ‘mmm,m ,,,, juioy’.

11
Graduation

After all of that, the smell of copper coins.

A cloud of copper cradled in my hands.
Memory of scent. The scent of a memory:
your master’s year room, the bedding bestowed
upon the friend you’d banished to the couch.
My hotel room was empty but you’d said no.
Thinking my family took you for a counterfeit
you chose your own domain, the bare mattress,
t-shirts strewn and loose change everywhere.
Sweat, Jameson’s and something ferrous, yes.
The ridges and pimples of a hot coin at my thumb.
Pressed into my palm, cascading floes of coin.
Ostrich plumes, gratings, worthless crowns
and the ribbons’ whispered vow, Ich Dien.

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Afterwards, reading texts aloud
from others we’d included in our foreplay.
I returned to the hotel early, wondering
why they would call it a walk of shame.

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