modern-day Casablanca. by comatose-comet, literature
Literature
modern-day Casablanca.
we’ll always have #paris as will countless other couples who tag each other under the eiffel tower right where we stood together, beaming into the lens of a phone on self-timer extended out into the open spaces i longed to linger in. those selfies of us haunt my laptop screensaver, lie folded between profile pictures taken in vienna, strasbourg, budapest in the months after, my eyes never looking directly into the lens, frown-lines facetuned away, sleepless nights tucked under layers of photoshop and brushed aside by captions quoting drake lyrics. scroll down, my feed is littered with the likes of yours, sent before and after the break and the long process of archiving, blocking, removing. swipe right, my options are riddled with the likes of you, a thousand faces sharing variations of your twitter handle and hipster handlebar moustache. we will always have #paris and I can browse incognito mode the girl you’ve been tagging in Win a
it is Wednesday all day until it isn’t. never had much attachment to the days before now, saw them as the headings for collections of twenty-four novellas – who remembers days in memories? it is always the weather, the time, how your shoes pinched, how the birds sang, a memory is a picture of a thousand pieces kept in a box marked Friday. inconsequential until it isn’t anymore. the world ended in such a drawn-out way, you started counting down the days – not the hours and not the nights, weather and windfall, the absence of birds, the pinch of the solar system, all inconsequential. instead, those novellas penned in the last weeks of the world were just endless lists of Monday, Monday, Monday. Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday – unpicking forgotten gods from the roots, scalpel- wielding philologists finding poetry in phonemes and semantics. centuries of human evolution summarised in a chain of seven words: the order, the gods, the shared linguistic genes, the music,
she told me her favourite word one Tuesday when the sun fell sharp like lemon slices across wet tarmac and constellations of cigarette stubs, I drank it in – all these useless facts as if she would test me, hand me a paper with a series of questions: her favourite word, the song set as her alarm, whether she prefers seafoam or duck egg blue a perfectionist, I would get every answer right, be rewarded with those teeth clicking into a smile like champagne glasses shattering in an over-enthusiastic toast ask me whether she loved me and I would falter, but her favourite word was surreptitious and that’s exactly how I felt, holding my heart tucked in my sleeves and praying she would notice.
call my love tainted ground, would spit sacraments over it to have it blessed, pity she doesn’t know yet. writes my name in holy margins, hangs me on a cross-beam of discomfort and awe, strikes her as funny that I won’t kneel beside her, pity, pity. her folks always said widow's peak was haunted, best stay away since harlow came back bleeding dragging a blackthorn branch behind him, it’s no place for a priest’s daughter, pity, pity. she goes anyway, every Friday night in the witching hours when I can show her magic, haze, and hex, I let her stir the pot and make a god of her own hands, I wait - powerful spells need time to brew, pity, pity. brings me amulets for my troubles and ribbons for my hair, there was only white left, she lies, and I dye them black anyway. it’s a pity she doesn’t know yet, how doubts can fester like curses, how love can rot into malady – I’ve got a cure for the itch, pity she doesn’t know yet.
ignore the pointed hat baby,
i’m ten gallons of poison and
bile,
vile –
when storms sweep in
from the badlands
on black chargers
and appaloosa steeds
they blow me
like tumbleweed
through dustbowl towns
with hivemind townfolk
and priest’s pretty daughters,
what is love but
vile,
wild?
this one has eyes
like a renegade fire,
kisses an effigy of me
before she goes to dream,
i swear i’ll leave
when the hurricane next calls,
but she is all ribbon and
strawberry freckles,
lying in fields of sweet-grass
and hiding my gifts of wolf’s bane
and eye of newt in satin bags
where her rosaries ought to be –
bruised my third eye trying to picture you
in wet lace and albatross wings, it seemed
poetic at the time – I would have unwound
a thread of images around seascapes and
coral reefs and hung it all about my neck
in a soaring image of how you haunt me –
it would not do.
thought of you as the plus one in every
room, a useless third wheel on a bicycle I am
very talented at not being able to ride, I could go on
down these rutted tracks and spin a yarn about how I often
dreamed you’d teach me to ride a tricycle one day –
it would not do.
told a tale in the third person and whispered your name
between the lines, allowing t
i am having trouble differentiating object from owner nowadays.
nothing just is, it is or was always someone’s before i pressed it
against my cheek or flattened it under my gaze. the pocket-
diary at the back of a drawer once sweated in your palms on a day not
unlike today – balmy and anxious-making – you carried it to me with the awe of
a visitor before his god. it was a trinket in my hands now so bound up with that
strange moment where you bartered for blessings in return for this ill-omened
offering that i cannot bear to write in it. walked past a second-hand shop window
and could only see the fingerprints of love-st
he has never been happy in the first person, has always
kept his distance and hidden behind the ever-present you,
has tucked himself into a crowd of we and us and they –
his teacher once said that I
was no good for an essay, I
was neither formal nor convincing, I
was too specific a skeleton to build
a body of proof around. he thinks
he knows his bones better than anyone else’s,
but soon learns that it is better to cut a
one-size-fits-all garment in arguments,
and never quite trusts I again.
I, he thinks, is the monster hidden in a closet of taboo.
I, he thinks, is the rot in an apple made of wax.
I comes to him at night gas
One day I will not see you as beautiful. It is not now, it is not today. But one day you will be a face, divorced from all the photos I couldn’t bear to burn. You will be stood across the room, and I will meet your gaze with all the indifference of a stranger. My heart will not lurch, will not trip on the last words we shared, “take care, always remember-” It is not now, it is not today. You will laugh, smile, do that thing with the corners of your eyes, you will gesture like so, you will click your tongue and shake your head, you will spill your drink on an unsuspecting passerby, and I will hardly notice. You will approach
There was nothing surreal
about the weather
the day I found an alligator
under the kitchen table.
I didn’t know how long
it had been there, hadn’t
spotted the curve of its tail,
a sickle of wet leather
forming a crescent moon
in a skyscape of white tiles.
I had had a phonecall
pressing the handset
pinched between
shoulder and jaw,
stiffly reaching to click
the kettle, my back
to this strange visitor.
It was the breeze that
made me falter, glancing
akimbo while balancing
my body in this complex
juggling act of phone and
speech and tea and mug
and milk, flicking my eyes
to the backdoor, missing a
moment’s comprehension
of t