Jackson

When you dance it’s as if you gather the music into yourself, into the softness of your diaphragm and belly, and smear it through your body, along the long cords of you— tendons, neurons, axons, veins spine, lungs, bowels, hips— and extrude it down the pipes of your lean limbs. When you dance you keep… Read more

I use my mother’s lessons and both my hands to make apple pie with a tiny pastry apple      among little pastry leaves with carefully slit vents with whipped cream He fills himself up with pizza and curry and kebabs and isn’t hungry Everyone else takes a piece In the morning I eat the cold and… Read more

This is the pillow you slept on. It smells like your 3am skin. On my tongue it would be translucent smoke      and opaque wine and the clear water of your going When I look at it I see a space      surrounded by an incongruous frill It makes the sound of silence and of your voice… Read more

I pull out my patched I There’s a new cut in it, bleeding gently, persistently I try to suture it, but the stitches hurt more than the blade—that blade made a clean, sparkling pain, a sudden fizz, a breath-catch— I try to anaesthetise, but numbness is unthinkable, terrifying, now, after that blade so I give… Read more

Work done for now, we go out Motley friends and associates We have a cheap meal in a tacky restaurant with the sports channel on a huge screen above the table Men, 22, 23, lithe and powerful, risk their lives on bikes We laugh about some bloke called Dave who lived with his rickety mother… Read more

(for two voices) It’s just a thing. Just a thing. We did the research. We measured it. Don’t bother to write, to sing. It’s just a thing.      But      when we held each other           naked to the waist      the skin over our hearts           pressed close— That’s just pheromones, chemicals, your oxytocin receptors firing. We did the… Read more