Callum Chen

Your eyes, those lusterless pearls, blink all brusquely. I kneel down, press my nose to the hot boardwalk to

smell the perfume of your shadow: musky, smoky, post-storm shore. Something’s burning. I look up and

you’re looking up and if your hands were to find their sorry ways to my jaw, my lungs would collapse in

on themselves as the skin between furrowed brows does when a symphony swells. This is not music,

though, this is tragic. Your palms, once calloused, are bare now, are as open as the recumbent, limpid sea.

The beach house door frame grows more brittle by the moment. The plates pile high in the sink, sticky

with sun and sick. I look up and you’re looking up. We try dancing, we try song, but does this heat wave

guitar not grow wearisome, and you’re curling up further, still, in your roost like a used match. Come here

now, come over. No red string ties your pinky to a rotting one. Place that fate in the wicker basket of your

paint-peeled bike. You met an armless God some days ago as he was pissing over the side of that bridge.

You looked up and he was looking up! You shook his sweat-soaked, unwashed wing. Shut up. Get up off

of your knees and the heels of your feet. Stop trembling, deer. You are far too old to have these foal-shaky

ankles. Supper is ready: old stew and 100,000 pink paper hearts to split between us.

*published first in Argus*