Humans do things because they need to,
or because they want to.
Afterwards, we will peel apart the two,
careful-fingered.
Think of stories and think of love affairs as fruit.
Whatever kind you’d like,
splitting in the palms of our hands.
Let’s get mythological, make it a pomegranate. Let’s
get our mouths sticky, make it a mango,
let’s honour bad women,
make it an apple.
Let’s be burning and swollen and
spilling out juice
like the sun.
Make it an orange.
Make it everything
but what it is.
–
A man’s body: it is a slow
and golden wave of breathing,
sunburnt shoulders
twisting into
the light.
A woman’s body: it is a wearily awake
animal, pinned hard into the hot loop of
his arms. Listening to the magpies
and the honey they can spin
from their air,
their song all hot and unforgiving sweetness.
–
I say: ‘can you not see the shining core of it?
There’s magnitude of some sort here – ’
They say: ‘I breathed because I needed to.
I touched you because I wanted to.’ That’s all.
It was not his design that the sun would come through
the window on our nakedness
in such a way,
all leonine and faulty.
For him, it’s just a morning.
Bodies and birdsong and sunlight,
nothing but means to an end.
Around here we have different stories
to tell about the dawn;
the man, the magpies
and me.
Meg Drummond-Wilson is a second year Archaeology and History major at the University of Western Australia. She was raised in a fishing village pretending to be a relevant city by bibliophilic parents and a steady diet of Enid Blyton, and discovered that writing was a good way to pass the time as soon as she was capable of stringing more than two sentences together. She currently enjoys poetry, research, gossiping about dead people, Australian summers, and synthpop. She has previously been published in Pankhearst magazine.
