Porous

Everything is going to be okay if you don’t

give in / let your skin curl in on itself like dried fruit /

hang suspended in thin air / scream:

try to be more than dust on a stick of chalk, won’t you let life haunt you, instead?

be porous for me and absorb it.

I’ve come to help plug holes in the lie

we’re living inside your hollowed out mind

time won’t hang motionless on a pylon, framed in stale mist or within the tight

walls of a second

now or then tape eating back it’s ribbon

winding up the hosepipe you can learn from my father how to

take me back and rewrite me, there I was: drenched, dusty, desperate

needing all the monstrous parts of me.

Hold my lumberous body as if more beautiful than before

as if it had not fallen from Grace into something

meaty, straightforward

as if the ghosts slipped their nooses to scavenge

what was hungered away with a desperation I can

barely recall

once, did the cushions around your mind stop the rattling and the hankering?

As if the sea bags protected anyone

beyond how far you can throw one

with a decaying arm /

with a lifeless puff of exertion / in fact

I’m tired

the seagull swoops for my face and

I am resigned to the needling wind and the salt blowing up into all porous parts

left unstitched from the attack. I miss you, of course I do.

But let me tell you, life is not who you promised.

That betrayal fits neatly inside my relief that every evening, the dusk has come again

Flo Sandelson is a UK-based writer that currently works for Granta literary magazine and Hatchards bookshop.