whetstone mouths.

and so the tongue grows brittle again, needs sharpening. whittle away at pulsating points until hot copper fills your breath, and remember it all tastes the same. learn to bite down instead, you’ll see it all tastes the same.

make armour of innuendo, perversion to protect your prudence, be the wings that cannot beat beneath jewels…are you laughing at me? still wet though no longer of stone, needs sharpening. that nagging, gnawing nuisance of never knowing. to be of two minds, of two kinds - i’ve heard bad things happen to those too trusting, and most girls can’t afford to be dull but i always seem to have enough change for the bus home.

i frustrate fingertips stretching out six piece sentences. i talk too much and write too little, or, i write too much and mean too little. and how long are thoughts supposed to be anyway? i’m doing it again.

last month i wanted to be read different, and now i want to be just the same as before. and if i were as determined as you i would’ve taught myself to write with my wrong hand, but i don’t want to be new and i don’t want to be like you. i want to be lived in, many lives and just this one. you baptise me under a wet tongue but i forget every time. cheap imagery. im lying beneath the blanket on Valentine’s Day wondering why you thought writing for it would be hard for me. i feel like a body designed to love but yes, sometimes i feel like i am wearing someone else’s righting hand.

i found a manchild boypoet in the wilds of twitter and i cannot tell if his words are any good because i don’t know how to read poetry. he writes about getting sober and driving recklessly on a midwestern freeway, and of the e-girls in his DMs who vie for his anonymity. i read the landscape notes app screenshots like a drunken monologue and i still do not know. he writes with a bleeding heart humiliated by the small spectacle of living. a pit in my stomach grows at the thought of being ill-prepared.

when i am not myself and i feel my heartbeat in every extremity again i look up and i thank god with upturned palms. i remember speeding down the abyss in lexington, virginia. drinking the whole bottle of gin together because you didn’t want to sleep with me and there wasn’t anything else to do. i walked right through you. god entered my body as a body, my same size - like that - but i kept walking and you kept driving and trees once so vivid and reaching out to touch me are now just clouds of green. i can’t take the leaves back with me.

-

the sea salt in my hair is turning me unruly. i sit and read with a schooner of Carlton Draught to keep me company, as well as distracted from the sideways glances i get in my bikini cover up. next to me, two young looking fathers in hi-vis vests chat about work, then family trips, then the kids.

‘How old is your girl now?’ ‘Fifteen’

‘Good luck. My girls the same now, fifteen. She wants to get up to all sorts of stuff’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Just last week she asked if she could go with her friends on the train to Berry. I said no way in hell’

my ears perked up. i intervene.

‘What kinda trouble do you think’s in Berry?’ they look at me

‘Well nah its just that its half an hour away from us, thats too far’

he lights a cigarette and i do the same. the other father doesn’t talk to me. i think he’s avoiding looking at my tits, but he just as well could have no interest in talking to me. but its probably to avoid looking at my tits.

‘Fifteen right?’ ‘Thats right.’

‘I got into some trouble when I was that age.’

‘I bet.’

‘Does she have a sharp tongue?’ ‘What’

‘Could she get out of trouble, you know, does she have a sharp tongue?’

he laughs, at me or at her i’m not sure.

‘She’s got a big mouth.’