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Architecture of a Shimmering Mess


The city is a broken jaw spitting teeth of glass and scorched limestone

We are huddled in the throat of the city

waiting for the state’s iron machinery of debt to lay its eggs of fire

Your hand moves beneath my coat

not like a lover but like a surgeon seeking a bullet

The siren is a long grey needle stitching our nerves into the floorboards

I feel safe in the heat of you

a desperate furnace against the coming frost of the blitz

You taste of smudged kohl and cheap perfume

The grit of the mortar on your nape is the only seasoning left in this starving town


We are a mess of silk and shrapnel

Your stockings torn by the jagged edge of a fallen beam

I am tracing the line of your Adam's apple

where the powder has cracked into a map of trenches

There is no man or woman in the dark of the shelter

only the frantic animal and the chemical scent of the chemist’s shop

We are the trash of the empire

glittering in the mud of the black market

Your mouth is a bruised plum

bleeding into the collar of my leopard print coat


I want to uncoil the labyrinth of your spine

to find the wet velvet place where the archive of the state is blind

We are a liquid collision of sweat and cheap nylon

Your breath is a warm animal nesting in the hollow of my neck

I am devouring the salt of your panic

The way your skin shudders like a dying engine beneath my touch

There is a luxury in this filth

a gilded hunger that turns this cellar into a palace of bone

I want to lose the shape of myself in the city of your hunger

until we are just a single pulse of heat in the cold mouth of the earth


Your neck is a column of marble and smudged grease

I am painting my mouth with the copper of your spit

I feel the rough pull of the tape where you have flattened the myth of your sex

the wet friction of the binder against my chest as we collide

the shadow of a beard blooming through the heavy white powder of your face

We are a genderless ache in the ribcage of the world

a subversion of the bloodline in the dark

The state wants a father and a mother for the grave

But we give them only this shimmering mess

a beautiful heresy in the mouth of the bomb

I am wearing your scent like a stolen identity

while the world burns its maps and its borders

There is no law in the heat of this collapse

only the velvet violence of our bodies becoming one another


We are the smoke rising from the state’s burnt paper

a fugitive heat that refuses the gravity of the ruin

Your sweat is the only currency that has not devalued in the fire

I want to taste the lime dust on your inner thigh

to feel the sharp grit of the masonry between our sliding hips

We are carving a new world into the soft tissue of the night

where the law of the landlord is buried under six feet of debris

We have no country but this friction

no heritage but the red brick marrow and the salt on our tongues


There is a beauty in the way the masonry cracks

revealing the red brick marrow of the house

just as I want to reveal the architecture of your ribs

I want to trace the map of your veins

until they burst like oil pipes under the pressure of the dying sky

We make love in the rhythm of the anti-aircraft guns

a mechanical thud that rattles the teeth in our gums

Your skin is a wet limestone slab

slick with the sweat of a fever that has no name

We are two ghosts haunting our own living meat


I watch the way your blue grey eyes reflect the burning horizon

dilated and terrifying

the stare of a cornered thing in a grid of searchlights

I want to swallow the sound of your voice

to feel it tear my throat so I can finally speak in the language of the living

There is no tomorrow in this cellar

only the wet friction of bone on bone

the seductive rot of a world that has forgotten how to breathe

hold me until the walls become our skin

until the dust of the falling roof becomes our only dress

We are the maggots in the wound of empire

feasting on the warmth before the cold iron takes us whole

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