what’s the point in swimming when all that waits

for you is silk

Sara Aldrich

heat running like a seam and i need to feel the float. jeans sink me like rocks in my
pockets when i used to have nothing at all. i will drink until my belly is full, until the
unraveling, until the boiling, until i blink like a veil

and

i will kiss your cheek and hold my own hand. let me be your cufflinks, your corset,
your coat. fabric sloughs and chafes in cold but for you, the moon (the permafrost
will melt by morning anyway). rainboots in the snow breed icicle toes but the rubber
is bright against the flat white when it is all you have. to know absence is to need
it but hate its breath. to find sleep is to sip ego death. vodka no chaser but it tastes
like sourdough bread, or blueberries in october, or fresh blood (nosebleeds rinse
clear in cold water but i don’t know if it hurts me yet). fog lungs feel like velvet until
they don’t. your sweater is too yellow for the both of us, like taxi cabs, like california,
like pus, like the peaks and crests of facades torn down too soon. a failed
civilization births kittens in burlap (i will not let you drown them) and the mewling
rustles like a windbreaker when the waterbirth is done. and when the sun wears
holes through the eastern ridge, when the cloudbank eases, when i look at you
and you are wearing no clothes (how you have not gone blue is beyond me but i
will not take it from you no matter how many times you ask), when you are raving
mad about music, when the prophetic decay becomes you, the dawn licks your
shoulder frost as if to say have you given up yet?

yes. i think so.

morning is taut red on my face and i am but one mitten (the unknowing will not
happen until later). i breathe until i’m organ meat but still i wonder if you have ever
thought of me (or rather, cracked my limbs for crisper folds). if i have ever ached
inside your chest. if my name has ever warmed your mouth dry. if the waking is a
murder, or a cinching, or goodbye.