Words: Isaac Quirke (he/him)
‘It was just for fun’
That’s what we pushed through wind-burned teeth on nuclear-occasions
when the shit from the belly of the star was all around us
For my twin
When you awoke from restless sleep,
You were still living the dream
As if dreams could be tasted in the stale and very-still air around you
There was a thin ring of brown gel around the arm of a teaspoon
And cellophane relief lay strewn across the carpet
that once held something that was now inside of you
Though your stomach couldn’t account for it
And nor could the fingers that had tasted the danger and satisfaction first
It seemed so silly to be upset about it; ‘It was just for fun’
That’s what we pushed through wind-burned teeth on nuclear-occasions
when the shit from the belly of the star was all around us
You strove for glamour,
For love at the end of a cigarette
But at the end of each week, the best you could say was that it was
Sometimes cool, mostly difficult
and your twin never wanted to hear it and you didn’t blame her
But shame, otherwise
…yeah, mostly just shame and embarrassment
Each shooting star transient as the tide,
where the receding water left my body – a bed of stones, a beached whale – naked and afraid
Needing to rest, having done nothing
And each long, empty morning
Defined by breakneck time and waterlogged by displeasure
For what was a dream, if there was no running in slow motion?
What was the next image?:
You would put sweat-slicked keys into the hungry palm of another
knowing that you would curse your petulance once it was all over but
knowing, even then, that there was no other way to feel
There would be holes, an emptiness
That feeling of having left something behind
Jealousy – of course! (It’s me we’re talking about) – but
We would finally have time for something else
My twin no longer, but something better
A dream, yes, but
the kind of dream that only ended once lived all the way through
Unfixable by nothing but time
And so different from what you had dreamed it to be
