THE HUG
You reel her into your arms like the most beautiful fish promises burning through the bones you suck peppermint from her tongue & pull her hard into the linen of your jacket her lashes curl & you clench tight can smell the lake in her hair as her childhood starts to wind itself up the kites she traced with her father smoothing from her sweetheart neckline & startling the pale sky as all the greasy graphite sketches she scratched from the high-rise flat blown wide with poverty fatten into full blooming Crayola lines the colour of her fantasies dulled under the gravity of their own want spilt down her razor-bitten shins but you barely notice you love her so much so maybe it’s when you say Marie? & she is still you realise how cold she has been so cold for years her eyes buffed pale dry hair caught under your nails & you wonder if she screamed with the little air left in her lungs maybe when you were forcing her seventeenth birthday through her lips the smell of cut pine green static of the tent & that word she’d never heard before that maybe she’d said no
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THINGS I REMEMBER
The smell of motor oil & sawdust & the moon threaded through the chipped-blue shutter window of the shed his breath slipping through my right ear & steaming from my left the hairs spat hard on my wrist in reflex as everything between the sides of my head shook & settled the clouds thick white stains in the sky & the warmth expanding through denim it’s not that I didn’t want to tell you but I didn’t think you’d want to know
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WRISTS
Clutching both I’ve tried to divine the future in our single room of rum & candle-spilt light but we could only draw the past which made you weep onto your knees I applied teeth to the cigarette burns on the buttermilk of your wrists & they began to sing their only song spluttered smoke like two scarves flowing pulling us back to the moth-dust sofa you hid behind as a child watching your mother soak up your father’s beliefs until they were so true they cracked her ribs with their beauty her eyes the colour of kettle- steam & here you are holding yourself again the threads tremble a way back but you desperately plug the two holes with fingers tears smearing ash & we can barely see through the smog & screams of the room I call your name but we have made the gods of your past angry I find you heaved in the corner & all you can do is weep & cough tell me grief is the most terrible time-machine
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DANIEL SLUMAN‘s poems have appeared in journals such as Cadaverine, Popshot, Shit Creek Review and Under the Radar. He serves on the editorial board of Fit To Work: Poets against Atos and is Creative Writing editor for the academic journal HARTS & Minds. His debut full-length collection, Absence has a weight of its own, was published in 2012, through Nine Arches Press. He tweets @danielsluman
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Read more work by Daniel Sluman:
Poem at Fit to Work: Poets Against Atos
Two poems at Wordgathering