sappho's angels

We could have a kind of farm,

I suggest,

With a little shop attached,

We could make jam and lemon curd,

Maybe chutney or,

Other things in little packaged jars,

I could bake things,

You could sell paintings there too,

We would only grow vegetables,

And fruit,

We would cook things with love,

Labour the earth with love,

Live together in love,

I feel sure that I could work the soil,

I have always felt an uncertain hard need in my

bones,

To give something back to Mother Nature,

And I grew up in the country,

So I feel sure I would acclimatise,

But it is only a fantasy,

A sort of a story,

we find our way back up to the surface, blinking the light into blur, unwrapping hibernation from our shoulders and molting it white to the ground. 

i wade waist-deep in orchids, slipping on bloodpink petals, and your mouth is an open sky stitched up with silence and thin silver scars. time is a circle. april comes again and again, and it’s always the same:

you linger too long on train tracks and at the edges of bridges, but we’re both still writing poems about hope, because we’re not dead yet, only caught airborne in the flight before impact in a moment we can make last for another day, and another, and another, until you’re facing a birthday you spent years expecting to never see.

i’ll be the blade if you’ll be the sun that finally convinces me to stay.

(for napowrimo, from @avolitorial ’s list of prompts)

it’s spring, today.

i wonder how those animals feel,

on a day like this -

a day that feels like the first of spring,

although i know perfectly well that it isn’t -

breezy, and sunny, and

just the right temperature to be

straddling the line

between shivering and sweating.

are they happy

to be waking up from such an extended slumber?

do they stretch out their limbs,

feel the cracks and snaps of unused muscles,

and ache with the need to use them?

do they yell out to the forest -

   the tundra -

   the cave, even -

to tell all those who are listening

(or who aren’t)

that they are alive?

that they have survived,

that they have lived,

that they are here to tell their story

to anyone that will listen?

or rather - do they despair?

do they lament the loss of such easy times,

in which the heartbeat slows

and the breathing deepens

and the mind

just

stops?

do they reminisce on the months during which

they didn’t have to think -

about where their next meal was coming from,

or where they would find shelter for the night,

or how far away their children were,

or how long it would take to travel back to home -

do they ever miss the easiness of sleeping?

do they ever wake up and wish they hadn’t?

or, maybe, they feel nothing at all.

i’m photolytic for you, the way the room fillswith goldluminescence, mourning, morning, all of it,you make me resonate with the rage of a supernovaburning out at the end, i thinki’ll take it, you can put entropy in my milkand i’ll take 3 sugars. i’ll call this wildanimal feeling love

we’re just versions of ourselves all the time, smoke& mirrors. our bodiesburn where they touch. gasoline isn’t citronella oilbut you can pretend, if it makes you feel purer.if it makes you feel clean the same descriptions of cigarettes and home depots. theway the exhale feels,from the bottom of my lungs. disaster kids, young inthe 2000s, old enough to knowthat the next decade will only be demanding. i used topretend that CDs came from outer space,the silver sides some new kind of shiny asteroid, somekind of dream machine.

you exhale silver moths that wing their pale way into the sky. daughter of a land crushed kingless, silhouette of a city turned lightless against stars that shiver in the sudden dark. in the silence, you ask what poem i have clenched between my teeth tonight, and i kiss you, wordless for once. on a distant horizon, the flames are dying, smoke carried across the sea. we, too, are burning. we, too, crack like the teeth of ice, walking onwards to a half-forgotten dream.

4.the word vigilante sounds like a folk ditty. weturn the radio up.we dare to be ourselves even as they make listsfor slaughter.i think of all the flowers i couldn’t afford. ithink of all the summersi spent fearing climate change. i think of whatit meant in 2005and what it means now. we’ll sing through the debris,darling.the world will end, and they’ll try to take usdown with them,but this is what it means to be young –  that surreal feelingthat nothing can rip the wings off our backs. we’llfly.

in phys ed class today, we learned that girls my age only have to do seven push ups.

boys have to do twenty-five.

the other trans boy in my class stares at me and we sigh, suffer, sigh again.

which is more important? the teacher is still talking, but the words fade away when i start to speak. dysphoria or physical laziness?

the ultimate question of high school. his voice cracks with the distinct ring of puberty - or hormones, maybe.

my best friend helped me find charlie; told me it was him or alex. but that x sound,  eks maybe - too hard, too loud in the quiet, too much.

charlie, though.

charlie is two syllables,  neat and tidy with  a smooth ch and  an r that may or    may not be there    depending on the day and  a lie that isn’t pronounced like one.

charlie is dark red; a burgundy  like blood, but sweeter, kinder, on the tongue, a cherry flooding your taste buds.

i rub the name charlie between my fingertips and feel the smooth edges on my fingerprints, none of the hard parts of isabella piercing my skin.

somebody told me that they liked my name, once. the words came out sweet, honey in milk and chocolate chip cookies on my tongue.