Feeling Real

                                                  for the friends

Pulled towards realism, and rolled into the roughs:
lace across sexuated waves. Start again:
sexual uncertainties stretched in historical time
coming nowhere clear, and, under breath,
passional forms coincide to

flash, de-authorised
: secreting not quite a life, or sum of acts,
or the city’s wire frames fucked / unfucked
but struggles stitched into the breath,
mere flecks in common with the lurching communion
of the sea-green flashover in slo-mo of
transmorphing concourse, a slab of bodied time
which manifests as indirect connection
as in edmund is non-binary or, is not. Star sign, neo-bodies
made of gossip. Once –

in the red stone city – fairy ways confirmed the norm, securely,
but now they reflect too truly a changing, fragile force,
and fairies stand in as the failure of
a dream. More realness,
then less, passions smudged into limits
and the same passions set as if forever
against the grain. If fought for, against crisis

and control, and queerness the less
set and picked apart as force and tool under the aegis
of uneven exploits, when the world ignites
our skin, says ‘this is how you keep warm’
yet still, in a fragile abolition we’d read it all in Vitamin G
beneath an admittedly unimagined but ignited sky of tangled
stars, sickened shadow work against copulas of sweaty light
and new floral fuck-ups.

I Miss Myself / Shared Oranges

                                              for Nisha Ramayya

Secret platforms
shine in backwards movement:

fingerprints absent of skin, doubly
impossible; from denuded darkness

where I studied lemon-rind walls
of philology – pulled like ‘talking about

difference is
gludderly work’ – can’t cipher-cite

ways out so much as be a spill:

messages sent by a bird
that only feeds on orange drops

in rainbows, vomits stone particles – over
cow pasture and half-between columns

it goes – and stones sear into words,
& I’m running through.

‘talking about difference is gludderly work’ is taken from ‘we are seen by the world / what must be seen’ in States of the Body Produced by Love (Ignota Books, 2019) by Nisha Ramayya. ‘when the world ignites our skin, says this is how you keep warm’ is taken from ‘Against Queering The Map’ by Aeon Ginsberg, published in We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel (Nightboat Books, 2020). 
 
 
Photograph © Andrea Kirkby