Scraps

i live in dawns and dusks i drown in half-drunk coffee cups and mugs of uncertain origin i am a body stretched out by twilight hour of uncertainty spreading out beneath my paper skin along my veins of deep blue ink an ocean rushing down to meet the sky spread out inside my feet i can’t breathe these days i drag reddish footprints through a land of borderlines these days i store it up inside build a warehouse labelling my mind i write the life out of me. i breathe in twilight hour of impossibility where bodies meet the sun descends into the gaping mouth of the hungry sea whose gnashing teeth rip into flesh until it bleeds out into night and day with the force of those who travel far and cannot stay clash between the butcher and the woods and you and i on the cusp of something some thing some magic trick below translucent stars some manual on how to break a heart. i need the shards to shred my parchment skin to thin confetti both of us need the ribbons of a used up love so that the twilight caught inside my ribs the clouds clogging my lungs the weeds filling my mouth and the sound of sirens on a winter night come tumbling out like plastic toys that hid inside a kid’s surprise twilight hour of possibility. take your scraps and i’ll take mine to scatter them like ash across the carpet of the wood to dissolve them in the floods and they’ll erase the cries for help you wrote on the inside of your skin and wash away those notes:

‘dear god, I’ll believe in you if you’ll just make me a bit thinner’

‘is someone there?’

‘is it normal to be so alone?’

‘won’t you, as last resort, answer my prayer?’ won’t someone somewhere love me a little bit? and the pieces drift out towards the sea and on the branch of a hawthorn tree a bluebird crushes berries underneath its feet.

Words: Orla Davey, Design: Ariane Legradi