by Louisa Bethan Rimmer

Under the choke-chain-joke-shop moon
there’s a sudden thrill of my own being
as I press the shape of myself down into
the wet leaves like a name carved in a thigh.
black tarmac petals turn damp. when did
afternoon drive itself to night? I look at
the inside of my eyelids to check if there’s
anything hidden there, a confession pushed
like a tongue between the pages of a book
that shudder gently and are almost moved
to talk. what makes such solid ground so
thin, curling as globes of onion skins do?
(I press my face into the dirt to breathe as
roots can) how many people have confessed
their love in the rain? how quietly? And how
many hands would it take to count them out,
a human abacus of fleshy digits desperately
throwing themselves over grenades shaped like
arithmetic. a starling passes superimposed it
seems as I lie looking, and my organs leap up
to meet it, toppling out from my face, so I fall
away and my skeleton makes itself into a church
organ (all stuck keys from the tree sap and gum).
if you squeezed away all empty space, everything
would fit inside a thimble, or so I’m told. That’s
how I feel, an everything, becoming a nothing,
becoming an everything again. how to hold all
these becomings in an empty palm? Use the
sharp edge born when you snap off a bottle’s
neck and draw a chalk outline
where a poem should be.

‘Rupture’, written and read by Louisa Bethan Rimmer

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