you think you’re an enigma and maybe you are
maybe you aren’t. i think you laid out little road maps
to decrypt yourself. gave us photos of your veins and
waited for someone to bleed the colour of it in.
from the snatches of your life you’ve written
the person you were at seventeen
the journals and the blogs and the fire that burnt out
with its embers still whispering to you even if
none of it seems coherent, none of it is
the epiphany you were named for but you are
waiting.
you think you are an enigma and i love you for it,
you need your “gotcha” moments, you spin out
ballads of beauty and then end the poem wit
YOUR BOYFRIEND’S shirts smell like cigarettes. YOU think of roses & desperation. sun’s out, and YOU still think of jailcells, YOUR FACE on the missing posters. i think of how we used to be in the days of our youth, YOU wore that cardigan and YOUR BOYFRIEND wore ripped jeans. he laughed like honey and cinnamon, i thought YOU loved him like apples, sliced up, red and cyanide, all fresh and crisp to bite into. and i asked if it was love, and YOU said something in french. all the hotel rooms are empty, but YOUR jacket still sparkles in the right light. i’ve been up all night reading siken. YOUR BOYFRIEND’s been up all nigh
im not your friend of convenience by pansydiv, literature
Literature
im not your friend of convenience
the nerve of me to think that i should’ve been in on it
the gall of me to imagine myself your friend
the heart of me to think he would want me to know he’s okay
the horror of me crying in an english exam when i was seventeen
the scare of me with my hands around my throat
the beauty of me staring at myself in the mirror
the ugly of me staring into my phone
am i demanding too much of you? i thought we were friends
maybe not best friends but surely something close to it
enough to talk about death uncensored, enough to write poems together
about how we wanted to disintegrate. and there’s
an intimacy in it, in comparing
aphrodite passes the blunt to persephone, says
you have to tell me
how you did that, how you seduced hades
and they sit there
on the roof, the stars twinkling. persephone
looks youthful in a way that’s untouched, as if
she’s somehow
eternally seventeen or made of sunshine.
i didn’t have to do
much, she says. and aphrodite
who’s
spent years reading gossip mags &
articles about “ true love ” thinks about
how she saw hades
take off his leather jacket
& wrap it around persephone’s shoulders,
easy as breathing.
kissed the side of her head. gave
lesbian cowboy boot anthem. by pansydiv, literature
Literature
lesbian cowboy boot anthem.
i took your garden key and
grew roses in your backyard. the summer
is so hot it burns, but i like to think
that i am a knockout in this leather jacket.
i do my make-up to make me look
like lily of the valley, like sunflower ends
and the tips of matchsticks. with a laugh
curdling at the ends, i frequent
the local pub on karaoke nights.
i get off to the sounds of murder,
sometimes i find a pretty vampire girl and
i press her against the back-alley wall,
leave her with a hickey for once. my knuckles
are mountain ridges, which
has been said before, but i mean it
in a voodoo way. when i bite soft on them
avalanches roar like a promise.
last f
dead is a four letter word, but so is life. by pansydiv, literature
Literature
dead is a four letter word, but so is life.
still have your poster up on my wall. wrote you
more poems than i’ve ever written another person,
whittled into paranoia for you, probing across
empty spaces and missed phone calls and
once in three months but it’s alright because
we’re busy living life from here. made a joke
about a baseball bat femur. made a promise
to survive. i hope all the love i have for you
reaches you, wraps around you like a winter coat.
i still don’t understand isadora’s scarves,
and sure, i write poems about nooses sometimes
but i just want to hold your hand, just want you
to stay warm.
dear katie bouman:
everyone i know has space fever.
they’re circulating that picture we wouldn’t have without you –
sending it to each other on group chat
uploading it on their social media
buying newspapers with it on the front page
pretty marvellous that
you can use science to prove these things exist
everywhere, even in places
we couldn’t see them before.
would you call a black hole a miracle or a disaster?
black holes are cool, like
burning a hole right through the ace of hearts
nowhere to begin this poem because
it’s too big. i would collect
every fuckin’ four leaf clover for you,
braid them into a flower crown and
place this circlet of bastardized good luck
gingerly on the top of your head, like a halo.
it’s funny how pretty flowers grow in the gutter.
funny how my city, your small town
have always wanted to gut us,
wanted to devour us whole.
nowhere to put my love. not enough money
for the plane tickets. my darling angel, if i lived
in the same country as you did, we would conquer,
rent an apartment together. work as cashiers in the day
or something, i don’t know. we’d make an escap
Reminder: You're a fucking gorgeous human being inside and out and your writing is spectacular enough to take people to other dimensions. I envy the way you put words together and the ideas that run through your lovely mind. Writing: 100/10 Friendship: 100/10 Soul: Priceless Keep on keeping on, my friend.