Gnashing Teeth Publishing

| words that get in your teeth

it would be nice by Alice Carlill

it would be nice
after Frank O’Hara
 
it would be nice
to be sat here, having a beer with you.
the sun is splurging orange over the sky, and the
horizon is doing that thing where it blurs
so that you can’t tell where sea starts and sky stops.
I can hear the rushing seething heaving of the waves
as they smack and slurp at the shore,
sand-speckled pebbles whispering in a language
that you can’t quite understand –
but also, you can?
because my heart pumps with the rhythms of these
tides –
salt water seaweed in the depths of me.
and I think you can see that?
and I think maybe, for the first time in a while
I feel myself unfurling.
and I think maybe, for the first time in a while
that might be okay?
but I need you to lean into this,
to lose yourself in my landscapes,
or at least to look up at the crescent moon with me as I
curl into your luminous warm soft,
blackberry bruises on my thighs
blooming as I kiss the milky way speckle of
your clavicle.
anyway.
it’s now dusk.
there’s a velvet hush falling, and the boundaries between
bleed through & into each other.
I think these are the spaces that you and me could be.
anyway.
it would be nice
to be sat here, having a beer with you.

~

Alice is a London-based queer dramaturg, script supervisor, poet and performer. As a script reader, she has worked with the ETPEP Prize 2020, Theatre503, Finborough Theatre, & Katzpace, and has performed her poetry at various London venues. She is currently writing a performance piece on queerness and liminality, and studying for her MA at Goldsmiths. Alice’s poetry has been published by Ghost City Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, GoldDust and Factory Magazine

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