Maria Sledmere
Graphite
Bitter when you wake
and feel less immune. Pollen clots
in a chest that has suffered more than its
casual share of infections, dissolute we would
write to a sickly air and worry the written. I write
my grandmother with queries about flowers and write
my intangible lovers the unwritten secrets of their eyelids.
Bitter when you wake and feel less of anything, love doing
kegels before breakfast, love doing the correct fuck in the poetry
wars, etc. This was a devastating blow to the international exchange
of ideas, as when my period came late and I replaced such drops of blood
with other ellipsis, say, the milkiest betweenness of times when we text
and don’t. Bitter when you wake and realise you missed the meteor
showers last night, knowing the erotics of being mizzled in stars
in a primitive, subatomic way. The jostling of your quarantine
almost beats me into despair, Lyrid dreams I’ve been having
to fuck off the woods, putting cayenne in soup and not
having a care for my breasts. Is it even now filling my
eyes with the melting points of diamonds. I miss
you at any celsius. This message failed to send
and the people outside are breathing / better
when you wake in the oxygen, almost.
MARIA SLEDMERE is completing a DFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. She is editor at SPAM Press, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, a music journalist, member of A+E Collective, co-host of URL Sonata podcast and the Pop Matters workshop series.