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Emma Austin

Here we come to rest

they say it like a curse

a last day to touch the cakey flakes

of a face, like a milky porcelain dress-up

doll. I’m a tube of paste

whose face was redder, hers or mine

I could only catch it once and never enough

the wind is cold it’s like her ghost

fiddling with my eyelashes, softly caressing

hairs of my neck

her box that labyrinth of no touch

opens to a god, that deity oh

so wistful.

I imagine this

over and over.

she believed the world

and I, wrung from the cloth of despair

watch the water pool

in those luscious palms bruising

treatment, torture, becoming synonyms

the lands a coal mine I’ve decided.

bury me instead.

concrete corridors lost its soul

whilst the red streams inside me raddle

my sweet love, a flower, the earth's radius

couldn’t match.

only now

we have your black roses. It’s a tradition

Christmas for the beloved, forgotten

that touches us like a secret

its pooling again

my fingers don’t do it justice

perhaps there is none

inches deep in wet mud

where the soil opens

the birth of my heart