The Blood; A Window
All day I carried a key around the house, searching inexplicably. In the garden
I couldn’t remember our cloud-names. I traced the outline of your shadow along
the wall, but it kept slipping. I watched the water boil over in the pot. The edge
of the bathtub filling before the body. Displacement could be another name for
how we love. The tangle of the flesh across fresh sheets. The music moving from
another room. I wanted to grasp the light that fell between us. To colour everything
magnolia. Everything a sense of belonging in the afternoon. But I couldn’t open the
cupboard door, the handle too loose for my fingers. & when I finally pulled too hard,
glass shattered at my feet.
Another Place
Let’s say you are walking along the shoreline
and find a door, standing frameless & inviting-
almost a question mark. Or you open a kitchen drawer
& forget your lover’s name. You feel it hanging there,
slipping like the trace of a dream upon waking.
Let’s say we were eating strawberries, there
on the cold beach & you lost a glove to the ocean.
Let’s say somebody will find it washed up & think of you.
Suppose any of this was true. Suppose you could
grasp your future self, even for a second. Let’s say
everything is breaking apart. Or it is not breaking,
only opening; Let’s say there is another door.
Gravity
Light echoed all around us. You remember the flash that came before & so soon
left. The merciless undoing of nothing into something. You imagine a woman
sleeping on a train. The train gliding almost dreamlike across a salt plain. But
do you remember the sunlight moving like water through the glass? The skin
unfurling into ribbons? Suppose you woke & the body was already gone. You
remember how the whole afternoon was ghost-like & the room where the dust
refused to settle, but instead hung in the static air. You said you could measure
the weightlessness of a day. The birds leaving everything inside you. Do you
remember everything turning blue? Suppose your presence felt tangible.
Would you still believe so much in silence?
Mick Cormack was born and raised in Liverpool, England. Some of his previous work has appeared in The Harpoon Review and Mount Island Magazine. You can find him on twitter @bodiesandghosts.