Tag: creative writing

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kellyLeave a comment

if i walk down london’s streets to 
the ticking of the kitchen clocks—
rows of billowing steam from
stews and curries that do not remind me
of home—
i could almost traverse these eight hours, a 
second and a step at a time, 
outpacing the sun that stretches my shadow, 
undulating against the cobbled mews. 

i adore the way you speak my name—the hook 
of your tongue reels me back from everything ugly, 
crushing my mental map of loss. 
i am named for the millionth time, 
but beckoned for the first.
so i keep walking, addicted, faster than the 
ancient tempo of seconds, 

fast enough to escape the trawler of reason,

begging time to let me catch you at the end of my 
afternoon shadow. 

yet the line in greenwich is stubbornly still, 
itself a blade welded by visits of the sun, 
carving up the temporalities that 
melt away within these same four walls.
a playground of conversation—childlike fun until 
you yawn and say good night and 
blow me a kiss i wish the wifi would let lag. 

i don’t lose, my dear, i can’t, not to time nor space, 

so that’s why i rush home, wrestling the hands of the clock,
where i eat warm rice and xo sauce until 
i’m no longer starved of the illumination of my screen. 
until i forget that i am just like that paper-thin iris 
i plucked and hairsprayed from your bouquet,

in a dark room, 
leaning into that fluttering glow,
praying it’s not bloomberg news 
and that the connection is just bad today.

clean sheets in january

kelly2 Comments

my clean sheets, baptised,
stale and clawed by the january frost,
draping like a helium balloon days after
the party lights have dimmed.
my pillowcase smells not of breathless kisses, my
duvet tangled not by wrestling feet. the unknowable
warmth of the friction between our skin—its promise
leaks into the atmosphere with winter mist that clears.
we share nightmares

through a screen, but tuck the glow of our dreams,
tenderly, in the gaze we share when our foreheads touch. my father
once compared flower petals to hands held,
and i see it now in our alternating fingers—yours, mine,
yours then mine, yours, mine, and yours—
locked together by thumbs tracing
alphabets we have yet to teach each other.
it was nice having something to lose and something to learn.

where were our hands before we knew to
hold them this way, before we ever met?
yours, embossed by maroon grains of the track that paved your glory.
mine, coughing up another polite email that wishes well weekends.
yours, gripping a steering wheel when you drove away from a girl you loved and
mine, down my throat after a wednesday night i don’t remember.
that they found each other was a miracle, dearest,

despite the episodes unwatched, the skyline
dinners uneaten, your cheeky dog not walked. i stroke
the pixels of your cheek, the same one i kissed good night for the last time while
shredding any residue of logic. my parched lips are drained of their
rosy tint you so loved, scaly under the desert moonshine. its
cold nights tell me i should have lingered

on your chest a little longer—now i only get warmth from the sun,
its rays a faint gleam next to the beams of your smile. the one
we joked would make you a qualified dentist. we joked about the freefall too,
wagering flights and fragments, because we needed humour to forget how were always teetering
on the edge of something, darling,

like beggars dreaming of manhattan lofts,

and my mistake was simple.
the mountains i begged to make me feel small—
i never asked to make me happy. 

The Intersection of a Flare

kelly2 Comments

Today, I finally spat out your name,
single syllables starting pointed and steely, harsh
at their tips but meander gently into curves—the
seed of a fruit, one ripened last season.

But last season was just yesterday, and I am

a miser in love. The melody of her name plays 
as a maddening strum of your tongue—
the way you stretch it across a lovesick sigh,
have you noticed? Cocooning it with such tenderness, 
awaiting her metamorphosis about which you 
narrate predictions to me—the fool
who wishes those 
elegant, confident, poised 
wings of your dreams will 

Guillotine my gaze, like the way they cleave the air.
I wish them to sweep into a distant world 
your reflection,
the one that is dancing and falling off the
rim of a martini glass, a treacherous caldera…
the one I can’t save from being
entranced by the spotlights, from being
kissed and devoured by the intersection of a flare.

The jazz in the lounge is swollen with my passion and
I’m still the fool, and still the miser, 
suspending a pointless hypothetical in the air, 
its pendulous swing lunging my words out, 
then in, then out again.
Perhaps it’s the alcohol and the scent of the stars—
they press me dangerously close to honesty,
brandishing a candour so bold it would 
cement every plot hole I skirt around, 
undo every reef knot you said, more than a sextant,
would save a seaman’s life. 

Deeper into the night, the wine softens my edges and 
your faults trickle away, with wine legs that
seem to mock my tear-streaked face. 

You ask me of the plague in my mind,
the pensive swarm that shrouds my routine smile,

and I want to tell you that her beautiful wings did nothing for me, 
but also
that love makes me a miser, a fool, a girl who
hopes that for you, one day those wings open wide.

For as long as I write

kellyLeave a comment

We existed there—roving through time like the
party boats adrift, whimpering away their last song.
Rooted against every instinct, we stubbornly are,
though even the river shivers under the 
midnight blue skin of space.
I have stranded reason in the daylight, 
forgetting how the moon’s crescent cradles
my secrets, nearly tipping them in your ear.

Courting this memory like a fool—
a dream that evaporates upon waking, 
fraying more at the seams with every 
attempt at recollection. In a better world,
I would transform into portal of truth,
mapping the blueprints of this night
in every way but the fabled fashion I desire.

Would I still remember your gaze, 
so arresting that it confounds mine?
A fugitive, I leap from the cathedral to the city’s eye, 
then melt with the amber strokes under Blackfriars.
Could I still let you draw my hair back to
pick a misery, one that beckons softly
and glistens tenderly, eager to trust
like a lily from the earth?

As credulous as Gloucester, my fictions
a solvent for my facts. The walls with which
you say I banish you keep my brimming inkwells 
as still as the discontent of winter, yet
they remain as leaden as the Thames below,
Because when you say things like 
“The city was mine like never before”,
I can’t help but raise my quill,

and I am a lover for as long as I write. 

From the Glassblower

kellyLeave a comment

letters in letters you left, loose embers
frolicking in an innocuous upward twirl
to: you, a glassblower on that flirtatious gallivant,
breathing shapeless sand into golden honey.
fun, fun and games. you roll me over like a dice

and then i am at once spellbound, whisked
into a game i had always watched behind shoulders
but never joined. mostly modest
breaths shorten, breaths soften, till you
inflate me like a proud mother’s chest.

for every reason i can find to hate you
i have two more to love you instead;
for every thankless task i droop foolishly
like a homesick adult, one too tired to find the
itch in my spirit, the psychosis that bursts like

an outpour of flames to bake my lips into a stretched smile.
annealed, inside me every second of silence
burns my walls into a crisp. shoved
into an inferno, fished out as a pretty vase,
a goblet, a chalice… crystallized into

picture-perfect perfection. the treasures of Murano.

of the sweltering Italian sunshine. of strange nights
spent aching for more letters awash with love
from: you, to: me
of protests, shattered selves in the kiln,
haunting still potsherds of a heart that saw it coming.