Photo by Jared Zimmerman. Image reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.
Sometimes the Ocean Falls on You,Even When the Coastlines Are Far AwaySeagulls scattered over granite stepslike hot white ash.
You wanted your body buried.
The sea is coming for me, tooslinking under the sound of traffic, and circling the curb.
Trees breathe ghosts into this air,dream of powerlinestouching their branch tips.
They reach under the bitumentrying to entwine their roots.
Sometimes, the pavement singswith the memory of a forest echoes projected like a hologram, or scrawled over glass and cement.
Sometimes so far’ and ‘so close’are the same thing.
I remember youcutting your toenails,brushing your teeth,sitting in dawn light.
Water Conducts ElectricityWe race for the horizon like we could ever reach the end of it, or until the shoreline is so far absent Marion’s a speck. A long,thin, worried speck – he doesn’t like swimming. The water’s warm and reflects back sun like shards. I scrunch my nose so I don’t sneeze. Somehow, and we are holding onto each other in the water and my skin feels like it’s made of bubbles. You swim to shore with me on your back and I try to count the freckles between your white shoulder blades,slicing through the waves. I worry you’ll win sunburnt. You enact.
These poems appear in The Lifted forehead #30. win your print copy here, or win the digital edition here.
Izzy Roberts-Orr is a Melbourne writer, or editor,radio producer and hurricane. She is also co-director of the National Young Writers’ Festival and Executive Producer of The ReReaders podcast.
Source: theliftedbrow.com