amor, amat, amour

AMOR, AMAT, AMOUR

k newton

the candle gutters – flickers/ dances in the breeze and curls/ upwards, the smoke makes shapes and scenes/ a painter/ all in monochrome, his palette stained/ all the stark contrasts/ black and white/ and you don’t know which colours paint your face/ as you watch/ the smoke creep its way through the bars/ in front of your window.

would you call this love?/ dear heart, i ask you in earnest/ for what i feel is nothing short of devotion/ offering my heart up to the honed edge/ of your sword/ cleaving it and splitting it unevenly/ two jagged halves/ one so much larger and spilling/ thin but sticky juice/ white-tipped seeds on my reddened palms.

i cry ‘love’ despite this/ the gaping expanse in my chest where once/ something precious was nestled/ made its home but now/ lays a scattered bundle of twigs/ atop bloodied concrete./ i’d tell you i love you/ but i’d have to kill you/ or beg you to finish/ your half-assed job/ because you didn’t come close the first time.

1

weekly

we touch in isolation and kiss in moderation, every touch is punctuated by a soft breath in the tiny space between our lips. the bedsheets beneath us both are soft, starspeckled and bunched up beneath my knees. your knees. my back, as you push me down and cup my face in your hands and murmur praises against my lips.

on monday i’m pretty and on tuesday i’m beautiful; wednesday makes me sweet and thursday is simply lovely. the weekend is a blur, friday-saturday-sunday, all filled with your words. golden, stunning, ethereal, perfect, spelled out on my skin with the light passes of your lips and gentle touches of your rough fingertips across my back. that isn’t, of course, to say that i say nothing in return you’re my earthen miracle, i tell you, my sunshinesoaked boy, my summertime honeybee. in the summertime, when sunlight isn’t overshadowed by an unending downpour, i’ll hold your hand in the shade of overgrown flora, i’ll kiss you among the sunflowers. i’ll tell the world, unashamedly, that you’re mine and i’m yours, that we’ve both reached the feeling of belonging that we’ve been searching for for so long.

2

honey you kiss honeyed words from her lips while her hands rest on your waist. the fabric of your shirt crumples between her fingers and she tugs it away from your body, riding up and exposing your midriff to the soft summer breeze coming in through the window. against your lips, you feel that she’s smiling, and that makes you smile too as you break the connection in favour of resting your forehead against hers. there’s hardly any space between your mouths, your breath mingling with hers in the gap and knotting something up tight in your chest. you lick your lips. she’s wearing strawberry lipgloss. “sweet,” you murmur as you close your eyes and she laughs, gentle as the draft and a hundred times more intense. “sugar…” “yes, honey?” you can’t say it, so you kiss her again. the words still feel heavy, like something poisoned and so decidedly wrong where they sit on your tongue.

and maybe this is what it comes to - late nights illuminated only by the screen of your phone where 3

you’ve tucked it beneath the covers, holding it close to your chest. tired eyes threatening to slip closed as the clock ticks up and up, church bells striking one-twothree in the distance. maybe it comes to secrets that you bury deep, deep within yourself, secrets that still threaten to boil over and spill from your lips like a waterfall. and you wonder - by god, do you wonder why you couldn’t just like boys, why you couldn’t just be like the other girls you know who only worry about whether their boyfriend is still using lynx or whether he’s moved to off-brand cologne, why you didn’t have to hide that you prefer red lips to square jaws.

maybe secrets are a form of lie, but you hide your sunset-coloured love away until the two of you are alone anyway. dishonesty doesn’t feel so wrong if it’s for your own safety, you tell yourself over and over. not telling people doesn’t mean that you’re ashamed. of course, you don’t say any of it aloud. if she asks what’s wrong, you just tell your violet that you’re stressed, that the essay deadline’s coming up faster than you anticipated, and she laughs and presses another crimson kiss to your jaw and tells you to take care of yourself too. she offers you tea. your heart aches as you smile at her.

the pictures that plaster the internet make you feel homesick when you see them. you wish that were you were there in glorious technicolour instead of the washed-out greys of your home; you wish that you were kissing her on rose-tinted snapshots on twitter instead of 4

behind the walls of her bedroom. you wish you could take a chance instead of bowing your head to follow the status quo.

you tell your mother on a tuesday evening with salt streaming down your skin only for her to wrap you in her embrace and tell you that it’s okay, that she loves you no matter what. she wants to meet your - girlfriend. she wants to meet your girlfriend, and you’re almost giddy on how good it feels to not have to avoid the word, to have to tactfully say “partner” instead.

your mother starts sending rainbows at the end of every text and you wonder whether being yourself is really meant to feel this warm.

your girlfriend, all her soft curves and rounded edges, wraps you up in fabric that’s orange-white-pink and kisses the corner of your mouth in the june sunshine. you call her “honeydew”, call her “sugar”, you tell her she’s beautiful as she laughs and her cheeks flush until they match your skirt. “i love you,” you say, and the words taste like honey.

5

maybe maybe this is what it comes to - late nights illuminated only by the screen of your phone where you’ve tucked it beneath the covers, holding it close to your chest. tired eyes threatening to slip closed as the clock ticks up and up, church bells striking one-two-three in the distance. maybe telling people is overrated, why put yourself at risk when you can have your nighttime secrets, your twilight sweetheart, star-crossed lovers only after dark. the thing is, she’s so perfect, and you don’t want to ruin it. the thing is, she’s everything you could ever hope for and more, and you don’t know whether what you have could hold up under sunlight. you don’t know whether her promises of saccharine, sapphic devotion will come to life past dawn, whether she’s telling the truth when she talks of red lips pressed against your skin. the thing, you know, is that you just don’t know. and that’s the real reason you’ve never said it out loud, never told anyone what the two of you have, your tenpoint text on twitter past dusk. you’ve never said that word aloud before, the big one, never admitted what you are unless you could type it and be sure of reassurance back. it’s a weight on your chest like no other, it’s an ache that threatens to claw its way to the surface every day that you battle it down. you wonder what her lipgloss would taste like. whether her hands would be as soft against your cheeks as you think they would. whether her hair would tangle in your 6

fingers as you ran them through the soft waves, and whether she would laugh. you wonder, most of all, whether your midnight violet wishes she was laid beside you, too.

7

late may/early june he falls in love with the evening breeze that shifts the curtains. midsummer, the post-dusk air heavy and humid with the song of cicadas and whispered promises into the sticky air. the bathroom light spills into the bedroom, lights up the dull carpet and the painfully neutral walls with its harsh glow, silhouetting the other man as the water runs and splatters on the porcelain. from the bed, he watches. the dark curve of this other man’s spine over the sink as he washes his hands again, soft noises as the hot water burns his sensitive skin. privately, he wonders - on his back again, silent, staring up at the ceiling - exactly why he isn’t the one having a crisis, why he hasn’t locked himself in the bathroom to lean into the burning sensation of his lungs. his father’s influence would make sense as to what, exactly, would go through his mind, but instead his thoughts have been replaced, for the most part, by a static buzz, television screens in the early hours of the morning. shifting colours. fuzzy. he feels - something. he isn’t quite sure what. the guilt, he’s sure, will come later with the memory of an the angel’s lips against his. he’s sure that, on sunday, his chest will feel hollow as he bows his head in the pew, incense burning his eyes as he listens to the reverend telling him and all of the others exactly how guilty they should feel about so, so many different things. this sin this sin, the sin of his heart - is close to the top of the list, he knows. right now, he can’t bring himself to care.

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all they did was kiss, he knows, still staring at the ceiling as the angel comes back and lays beside him, atop the covers. his hands smell like mango, now, skin no longer close to glue from the can of coke he’d spilt over himself as he’d laughed at something dumb he had said. it felt good to make someone laugh like that. it felt good to know he was making someone happy. “hey,” his angel breathes, pressing his forehead against his bare shoulder. “sorry it took a while.” “no worries,” he says, equally soft. “i was thinking.” “uh oh,” he laughs. “about what?” “oh, um, y’know. stuff. things.” “sounds important.” “oh, not at all.” the laugh sounds like the promise of sunrise and white winters as he smiles to himself, too. his eyes crinkle at the corners and he looks free, looks ecstatic. his hair curls around his ears and liberty longs to run his fingers through it which, well, he’s already given in to enough of his sinful thoughts today, so he does - shifts their positions and smiles as his angel lets out an appreciative hum. “soft.”

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the angel laughs again. it does things to him. he thinks that he likes it.

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your name is persephone and she is hades, ripping you away from your comfortable and settled everyday life and plunging you instead into a world of darkness and pain where all you have known before and all you will ever know again is rust and decay. she is hades with the taste of forbidden fruit on her lips, tart and sharp as it coats your own. her garden of rot coils around your ankles and anchors you to the dirt beneath your feet as she pulls you in once more.

in one ending, you get a reprieve, brief moments in the light. the real persephone got six months apiece but you get nights, usually, and evenings rarely. in a fairytale ending, in one cut down from the abomination that is the truth, these brief moments of freedom would lift all the weight from your shoulders, they would set you free and let you take off the mask of cold calculation that cages your face and closes off escape.

that ending is not yours. that is not what happens in your story.

11

soft-hearted the candle is barely beginning to gutter, the flame drowning in softened wax, and in that flickering light something in his eye catches your attention. it draws you in - hook, line, sinker - and you can see him shiver when his eyes meet with yours, locked there, fixed in place. silence. then, softly, his voice. “my love?” there’s a thrill that runs through you at that - love, the two of you so honest, open with one another about it that the fear cannot touch you in these late-night meetings, dalliances. you love him and he loves you and these two things are truth as much as two-plus-twomakes-four. “you’re beautiful,” you say, which are not the words you meant to let leave your mouth but they make his cheeks colour and his gaze dart away as he coughs, clears his throat, caught off-guard and suddenly flustered in two words. “i mean it, you know. you’re breathtaking.” “charmer.” “only for you.” the candle flickers again and you glance down at it, frowning, noticing his eyes tracing the soft edges of your silhouette against the strings of lights on the wall behind you. the sharp smell of the smoke catches your throat immediately after you bend to blow it out. the room 12

suddenly seems so much darker, despite the fact the small pillar had barely provided any illumination, silver spirals making their way to the ceiling and into the cool night air through the cracked-open window. “smells like a birthday,” he says, bouncing one leg, soft pyjama pants over his scabbed knee from where he’d stumbled the day before. “you know what i mean?” “i do,” you say, because it’s the truth. “happy birthday.” “it’s not for another six weeks.” “happy early birthday, then,” you say, grinning, laughing when he reaches across to take your hand in his and hold it gently, bridging the small gap between the two of you. blue ink snakes its way up and around his arm, the letters and shapes so smudged you can’t make them out anymore, but the patterns are almost a kaleidoscope, up almost to his elbow, an insight into his mind, the smallest glimpse into his innermost soul. it’s intimate, in the strangest way. “do you want a drink before bed?” he asks, glancing down as he brushes his thumb over the backs of your knuckles. “got that hot chocolate you like.” “yes please, then,” said with a smile. “you’re so thoughtful.” “i try.”

13

he does. you know he does - really, truly. you help him to his feet and set the candle on the window ledge before you follow him to the kitchen, wrapping your arms around his waist from behind and pressing your lips against his hair as he measures the milk out for the pot. he laughs, and his hair tickles your nose, so you spin him around to kiss him properly. “i can’t wait to live together properly,” he says, an admission against your chest, forehead pressed against your shirt. the faded edges of a graphic catch his words, embrace the secret, brand it into the muscle of your heart and you don’t bother fighting the smile. “neither can i,” you say and then, just because you can. “i love you.”

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hands “did you know,” she says, voice soft, “that people believe you can see how happy someone is just by looking at their palms?” he raises an eyebrow. “do they,” he says, humouring her. “how do they do that?” in lieu of verbal response, she reaches for his hand, opens it wide and pulls it close. his fingers curl for a moment at the feeling of warm breath against them before he steadies himself again, flattens it out. it’s - it isn’t unpleasant, to have her analysing his hand, to trace the lines that cross it, that mar it, lingering for a few seconds in the centre as though imagining angry circles, flaming red against his pale skin. “so,” he says, voice barely steady. “what does it tell you about me?” “it tells me,” she says, “that you’re so loved, you couldn’t possibly comprehend how much.” she presses his palm back against his chest, her own hand covering it. neither speak - silence reigns, briefly, and he wonders whether she can feel the throbbing of his heart through his hand, all the muscle and flesh contained within it.

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