camber

from September 2021. I felt as soon as I got the words right I would be able to move on from the feelings, reassured that the time they represented was preserved now in a kind of amber.

Last summer I made a pact with the sun. I let the soles of my feet bake on the marble and thought a lot about mothers, if I could have been one. He said this was something that would make us grow up.

This summer he said I was a night owl. This summer was animal.

Saw signs in the grass: broken Christmas baubles, a lone nutcracker facing up; two deer in the abandoned tennis court; a dead finch, perfect rosebud-wrapped, placed there like a gift. The bird’s foot suspended among the olive flowers, the word “reliquary”.

They found a place in the desert so hot it’s inhospitable to human life. You spend half an hour there and your brain fries like an egg in the sun, runs out of your ears.

This summer, ill-fitting and too long. Girls in the city with lollied accents. Boys on dirt bikes in the backwoods. Blossoms in romance colours, Gawain red and lilac like a dish of ice cream. Spiders in the grass around the raspberries, creeping. I couldn’t work out your angles, what you had in store for me this time.

Salad and savings. Very little of the body. A scar crescent-thickening on my right nip where the piercing used to be — a sliver of moon, of toughness. He talked about what it felt like on his tongue, how he used to slip it under, its metallic taste, like it was a horse’s bit, like it was communion. He was the one who taught me about transubstantiation.

Last summer, he asked me “Tender violence?” which summed up everything.

Midsummer crested, sky like a wide, white bone, lungs unfurled and drawn wide, and I wanted someone to nail me again with a question: you censor yourself because you’re afraid of God, don’t you? Do you think anyone has ever thought about you, all the time? I wanted a hard conversation; eye to eye, hand to hand, bruising.

The heat curdled, made the fruit goo, made my thoughts sap and pull like toffee. The word “infernal”. The clegs bit the insides of my thighs when I was on my period and for weeks after I woke at 4.30am scratching. Became obsessed with google images of their scythe mouths, of these small mothers feeding that blood into the next generation. My blood that is also a stranger’s blood. Mi casa es su casa. Mi sangre es su sangre.

I decided to move and then things around me began to move. Plank, wood, bone, my mother took apart my grandmother’s bedframe, ribcage plying, wishbone prying, while I pulled the garden weed from weed and chopped the roots of the old pine tree. “Chopped” is not a hard enough word; anger is hot and addictive, spilling. The roots had gotten under everything.

I got angry at God in the kitchen lamplight. As in, so fucking angry. I didn’t want to feel anything for Him at all.

August: roaching, incessant, hot. The silver twitch of fly wings, dizzy. Vinegar fly traps. All thunderstorms, the heaviness giving in. We stood under the pine door while the rain passed, laughing, easy. There were still chunks of pine from the roots stuck to my clothes. It felt like we were getting to some kind of grace—us, this. He said real life doesn’t have neat endings. We agreed on that. There was a time when I could have pulled scripture from the fine lines around his eyes. I wondered if I looked grown up to him now.

The wasps came close when they started to die. The bright, spiked green of horsechestnuts hung in trees and there were wildflowers in every conceivable crack in the streets. The heat — excoriating. Brambles glistening, jewel tender. You could peel the sky back and reveal something teeming and gory underneath.

And this new one, sharp-incised, biting the insides of my thighs till he drew blood. Me slicked on his teeth, putting the blood to my lip, saying Do you taste yourself? I touched his face and thought of churches, the carved symmetry of allegedly holy places.

These two summers, tied back-to-back and going down. My ribs, submerged, now coming to light.

I feel like I lived you before. I feel like we met in another life and by the end I knew how to take you on.