1.

Hands that are unaware of all your sores
Do not know how to stroke you
And the voice that didn’t tell you stories
Cannot bring you peace
To know all my bruises in alphabetical order
Feel my body become
A temple of pleasure and pain
And still don’t know how to hold me
To see the hidden paths and the highways
But still need a map
I tried
In all the languages and all the ways

2.

I found my skin again in the ripples of your bed sheets
Unwritten maps of dreams bending, curving
The warmth of broken bodies
Slowly disappearing under crisp air
Trying to hold on
A new kind of feeling
Something unknown that you miss
A twisted ankle on the staircase
Carrying the weight of untraveled roads

3.

Entangled
A gentle caress
I give away little parts of me
Unknowingly
The gesture becomes routine
I lose what is yours to keep

4.

Nothing but the warmth
Ankles and wrists holding onto meat
The same bleak world, same bodies grasping
Onto each other looking for more than skin
No beginning, no end
Just a feeling of loss
Just a feeling of familiarity as my days pass by
Cutting the smoke in between mirrors
From one room to the other
Glimpses of me
As the light falls on your uneven paintings
I become the sea I become the crowd I become the house I become the time
Nothing but the warmth
Nothing but the cold
My heart

5.

It took me three years to notice
The houses on my street are connected by wires
Black fragile wires dangling at every breeze
Intertwined like love stories
Recently I started to notice mine too
Leaving trails on the pavement
Sometimes chalk drawings, flowers and hopscotch
Pulling me backwards and forwards
Other times angry unwanted tides
That the moon keeps bringing
There’s a storm coming in this town
On this street, by this window
I’ll be waiting moving weeping

6.

1 hour and 15 minutes
You start to miss the things that pissed you off
Hidden spiderwebs
Unfinished skirt boards
Sticky floors
Little things that only you noticed
Like the black mark on the living room door
When we drew with found charcoal by a dinosaur footprint
A blue shade underneath the green in the porch
When you painted the house one summer
because it looked nice on Pinterest
A tiny nail when Evie was little
Embedded on the stained carpet
A spot of milk somewhere between the floorboards
The broken cupboard handle
When we travelled to space
And one day someone else will paint over
Change the carpets, replace the floors,
Fix all the broken pieces

7.

Can it get worse than this?
Sitting in this stupid Edwardian chair,
the one I stained on my period—
One of the few things we agreed on for the house.
I make mental lists of what to keep.
I cleaned everything, so I assume they all want to go with me
But maybe they just prefer to stay—
with the one who neglected them,
stepped on them, ignored them.
Through the curtains, weak light fights its way in,
only to expose the dirty glasses.
A house sits at the front, blocking my sea view.
The streets are haunted by hope,
in the embraces, the enthusiasm.
Would they make it?
Would they try harder, where we didn’t?
Would they know how to give space?
How to take it?

8.

Your salty lips are moving
The sounds melt into the cold floorboards
For the first time silence
Closer and further away
With the tide
The lines you’re made of spill over rugged carpets
The sea glimpsed through a round window
The grey that was never blue
Spiderwebs swaying in the draft
Unfinished sketches

9.

I asked her to play a song
Of the silence we lean into

The broken promises
The vows
The crying
The shouting

The less
The more

We gave and gave
In lightness and in weight

I wake up to wet pillows
Teach the parts of me that held you
To no longer want you
Stop waiting for your name to mean home

Met others with lust and anger

Somewhere in this chaos
Of see me, choose me,
I learned how to stand still
How to see me, choose me

As she sat down and touched the chords
She played the space I’m letting go of
The one I didn’t let you in
That always belonged
to someone else
And maybe,
now,
it belongs to me

10.

Without my consent changes happen
First the blazers
Then a party upstairs that I don’t want to join
Each Friday
Some broken glass on the hallway—
Some things will break if they’re bent too far
Without my consent changes happen
Another country at war
And my grey tights have a run
A little girl tries to see herself
In the cracked mirror
I used to reach for your hand
Now I picture it breaking

11.

Focus
The charcoal sketches
Of the view across the street
In the light of a 2 mm hole
Focus on the trip that will never happen
On the oil painting that could have been
A soft chalk drawing
Focus on the nettle dress
The unfinished lunches
Focus on the sustainability project
On the overfilled bins
The silence
The noise
Not on the love story that never ends
Not on the love story that never begins

12.

Ask your dresses whose body they held in
And the womb who picked it
Ask your curtain how was the laughter, the crying, the abandonment
Does the carpet remember every thread of your hair
The bed sheets the weight of a broken body
Ask
The minty walls in whose colour you’re trapped in
How to feel lonely in a house full of people
Answer in your kids’ chalk drawings, in the hidden rooms’ dream
Answer in a never-ending broken car
Answer in a dog, in the absence of traditions
Bury the broken mirror in the light of the moon
Make a cross spit three times
Say goodbye to the parts that never belonged to you

13.

I’m sure you have your own fucked up version of what happened
I was too much of this too little of that
Remember my flaws as your kids come out screaming into this world
The same place you adored
That you’re not allowed to
I won’t give you my body I won’t give you my mind
Remember my strength as you swarm your lies into this village
Begging for understanding
But I was breastfed by a gipsy and ran barefoot through the woods
I drew with blood and saw death so many times
Your words just echoe from the caves I play in
From lovers to monsters
This is not good
It’s the worst bye

14.

A place that you used to know
The sky the cable lines
The wagging tail full of fleas
Unchanged, waiting for you
Murmurations twisting turning
But not the buildings not the light
Not the roads not the stops
The voice the fading letters
Not the leg that steps in the puddle with cigarette butts
The book, not the feeling
Not the confidence this body walks through a world
That she doesn’t want to fit in anymore
But there is a price to pay
The place doesn’t recognize her either

15.

I guess I’m not at all worth fighting for
For bitter
Or for worse
I gave you me
I gave you you
And you took me from me
And you took me from you

16.

The quiet shadows of our kids playing
In some sort of cold sun
Before we tell them
Your heart would break if you had one