Epilogue on repeat
A dream that cannot
be told,
I have lived
today, too many times.
Holding this
frail weight of sadness,
washing off sour green
that clings as the taste
of scallions;
my hands heavy clouds,
torn teeth grinding like
scorpions fighting. Stop
the clock, I
want to get out. That is
not how the story goes.
Tomorrow, the sap still
dripping, my eyes
birth yet another storm.
My therapist once said
you’ll grow to love
the rain. If only she knew
that I just sink —
here, flowers never grow.
Daylight saving time
The clocks went back tonight
in the hallways of his house. We are
dreaming
in two different languages.
He watches me swallow hedgehogs.
One by one. Melting under the roof
of my mouth.
Moonshine blades dance on our necks.
Until I become dawn,
his tongue will be my homeland.
Let me live inside
the glade where his collarbones begin.
Inhabit the skirtings
of wildflowers in his thighs. Uncurling
as ferns across his chest. A forest
festers, ready for blood at morning light.
Each second spent is a second gone.
Happy birthday, he is singing. And I wish:
to see him dressed in idle pink sunrise
again tomorrow.
My eyes moored
to his lips. A solar storm unravelling
into one hundred years more.
Crying at a bus replacement service
The flight was delayed. Enough
for two airport wines, two luscious
mistakes down a throat parched
for all the words he never told me.
Listen, absolutely anyone can cry
at boarding gates: chests as sandcastles
waiting for the waves, the tears roll
down like shells at the mercy of surf.
But now it’s me against this window
in a bus drowned in autumn. Outside,
the night wears black to mourn the day.
“Never let me go,” I said to him before
take-off. Now his absence is slowly stitched
to my skin by each mile gone, between
towns I never heard of. Perhaps he hides
in the void I left behind, tiptoeing
into the cavern of a wound. Or he will
discover how much coldness cotton holds
when a ghost patrols the bedroom.
My voice is bleeding like a stabbed
pomegranate. And a lonesome
road takes me to this place where he is not,
lulled by a foreign engine and the dry
comfort that only comes after weeping.
But remember this: no one cries
at a bus replacement service. Except me.
It’s a pathetic cacophony. I think of the birds
that will come back for a spring we’ll never see.
__________
Luís Costa (he/they) is the author of Two Dying Lovers Holding a Cat (Fourteen Poems). His poems are available or forthcoming in Queerlings, Stone of Madness, Roi Fainéant, Visual Verse, Boats Against The Current, the anthology He/She/They/Us (Macmillan), and elsewhere. He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths and lives in London, you can find him on social media @captainiberia.
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