A
Anonymity was important to him.
He did not like to be
CONSPICUOUS.
From the font he used to write
to the trousers whose waistbands
he touched when shopping,
all was understated.
He did not like glasses.
When she held him,
he shivered,
not because of his love,
but because of his aching to be alone,
to touch his arms
and marvel at what was beneath the skin.
Only so much of the body, he thought,
could be made better by another’s hands.

B
She loved the way her eyelashes looked
after water.
Her coffees were black,
and she’d sit on the doorstep, smoking,
wondering whether philosophers were born
thinking.
On dark days, she couldn’t dance,
unless it was the dance of a blade
across the wrists she knew were too think,
or the drumming of finger-heels
on the glossed wood of her thighs,
where she would take the flesh
and scream
at how trapped she felt.
The blood on the tiles
was confirmation that she had something
to lose.

C
His nose nestled her shoulder
and he said:
“Can we play today
because I’m excited about the new swings
and I like them
and I want to play on them
for ever and ever.”
She kissed his hair,
and said:
“Yes, little one, of course we can
play today
because I’m excited about the new swings
and I like them
and I want to play on them
for ever and ever
with you.”

D
He slapped her.
She wept.
He told he couldn’t love her
because she is not as strong
as the men he sees
carrying bricks at the train station,
or wiping the damp locks of hair
from their glistening (and perfect) brows
in the heat.
He told her that as nice as she was
holding her, soft, to him
and whispering against her collarbone
in the painted times before morning
did not make him sigh
as pressing a wondrous hand
upon Jack’s shifting muscles
as he stood to pull on his jeans.
He told her that Jack
had been solid,
whereas she was ever leaving him.
He told her he could never
love
someone who was barely there,
a flickering surrender
in a far off, collapsing, house.

E
He grinned.
He kissed her.
He liked how the sound of their mouths
was everywhere and no-where
all at once.
He stood up, stretched,
and told her he had to get his things ready
for school.
He loved that she was older.
He loved how her breasts moved
as she leaned in to help him with his lighter.

F
He listens to her distended stomach
but isn’t sure what he’s listening for.
She smiles at him, and he runs a nail
like breath
across her bruises.
“I’m so sorry.”
She shakes her head. Her hand falls.
“Sometimes,” she says,
and her voice is every bird call he knows,
“I wonder which one is the father.”
He tilts her chin.
“Darling,” he says,
and his voice is every chord she plays,
“they all are. They are all me.”
When they had first met,
she had asked him
what to do.
He had told her
she should love all of him

and even in the summer nights
when he is almost all of them
he sees
someone push her away,
her wipe scarlet from the white of the bathroom,
her pausing whilst tidying plastic toys away,
the fear as someone’s hand knocks her face askew,
the nervous smile as she sees her body the way teenage eyes see her body,

then he awakes.
He sees the curve of her beneath the sheets.
He apologises to her spine
for being six people at once
and keeps blinking so
his only constant
is preserved.