overhead lighting

I keep staying up too too late. to look at pictures of hothouse flowers online. eat the thought of them as I sleep. develop a bad back from it. wake up angry from trying to find beauty by myself at 1am. I know the answers. I know it’s never found in 1am alone. but keep drinking the lurid scope. eat the blossoming of shadows. chewing on receding dreams. huh. wake up with a mouth unwashed and look again. alright. spit out hot-house flowers in the kitchen sink. train resentment to move in other directions. touch the pool with your finger and watch it part. say it again, more slowly. bright coral, anemic-pulse greens. colours like a sick-bed’s
refraction. slower, sorry. drive to work and churn the streets. thank you. trace the unending concrete. try-hard wishing. don’t do any work. fall asleep at the laundromat and wake to the sop of rain. shared mouthfuls. thank you. way too expensive soup. turn down what you need. come again? spit in your hand. sleeping with the heater on. pressing cheek to cheek. go on … tell me. tell me again. and sometimes winter opens up, a wide, tooth-filled mouth. light glinting off enamel. breathing in the dark. cutting green apples. the flesh bloodless as day. your eyelashes when you say it. you look up to the ceiling because it’s easier to speak. isn’t it? warm water in the sink. bougainvillea moves into my glands. your hands over my hands. the way you turn up at the front door. petals pressed to jelly. the appliances go out. breathing fuchsia in the shower. warm breath in my pocket. waiting in the night has a pleasure to it. it is so vast and full of cold air, opening, burrowing, mouthing, burrowing again, from somewhere I don’t know how to get to

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Tara Leckie (Ngāi Tahu, Pākehā) is a librarian and writer of short stories and poems from Ōtepoti Dunedin. You can find her previous work in takahē, Symposia, and Rat World, amongst others.