et al.,

Mouth to my mouth, you poured the river. At night, I heard it going between ears. Cheering at my silences. The turgid weight of it. The aggregates of your life settled below the silt. And, your alphabet returning to the season to spawn. Then, you stopped kissing my kiss■ #VSS365

A painted picture of a man in a river. In the river, a boat. A childish boat. The pages of a woman's poetry, full-mast. His wet fringe hung over his face like the broken wing of a blackbird. As she starts her song, the river quickens. Bye-bye Blackbird, her choral lilt■ #VSS365

The nightsky, pupating stars. And the sea poaching fallen planets like eggs. The wriggle of the alphabet shore. Float on by. The words your mouth spat upon the river. Travel, you had said. And I travelled. To there■ #VSS365

There is something about walking into falling snow. My feet going at the miles between us, like the hands of a clock does time. The musicbox in my chest, soft susurrations. I follow the streetlights, tattered ropes of light. Do my feet even touch the planet of your name? #VSS365

Bit me like a chocolate bar, moved me to the roof of mouth. Never doubt a starry night, Behind the eyes■ #VSS365

I see you resting there like a plank of light upon a tree Out of the sun you make fuel for me■ #VSS365

School. In sneakers and pop-socks, I go there. I gloss my duskened lips with sunrise. The dull chalkboard sky. I raise my hand, fill it with the vowels that have befallen my hand. The boys, blushing. The kink of their riverine whispers. My pink moon knees, plenilune■ #VSS365

The river was stuttering out of town. Taking sips out of our time. Don't you ever look between the letters upon the page of a book and see the light of the sky. I agreed with that. As if the leaves of a tree. A marvel, she said, catching tears in the valley of her hand■ #VSS365

Upstairs. She fills the suitcase. For-ever, she said. As you press the ivories of the Steinway, a thrush vocalises the sustained keening of the river that leaves this town. Her footfall. Tearing at the roots of what once was. The moon. A floodlit palm across your face■ #VSS365

You picked me up. In your mouth. The way a herring gull does a cockle. You rose into the sky. Opened your big mouth. Dropped me to the hard ground. To break me. To reveal the inside of my mind. To swallow me. To pass me through your body. To watch me fall one more time■ #VSS365

I stare at the bedsheets. Last time, first positions. The folds, stunning in their stillness, held like the wake of ducklings behind their mother. We used to reset them each morning. I leave the crests and valleys just as they fell. Your side remains an undisturbed shore■#VSS365

We are in the last memory of our first dance. The nightsky falls. A pocket full of sixpence. Eventually, we fall, too. Time goes around the back of the grandfather clock. When it is ready, it turns back. The roly-poly moon makes its appraisal. When I awaken, you are gone■#VSS365

The sun is sketching shadows. The laneway opens to the bonnet of the sea. We lay. Cheek to blanket, I look at her. The rise of her breasts against the sky are like the hills beyond. If I could, I'd set the sun into a ring of white gold, put it on her finger in appraisal■ #VSS365

The demon Sun was up, staring into the looking glass of the sea, fixing its mad crop of hair. Time crept around the bend. The last light of the day slipped away. The velvety nightsky came down like the curtain of a theatre. To appraise him, Moon turned on her task light■ #VSS365

Furiously, she shouts, furious, winter in her eye. We are as done as yesterday. The rootball is beyond repair. You have pruned the life out of me. She goes on. Raises the suitcase into the pallid air. Inside the music box in my chest, apprehension lifts its lid and sings■#VSS365

I let her in. Her florid cheeks, blooming from the cold rain. We don't speak. There is a hard, brief light through the blinds. We move against the wall, dry-mouthed, hitting the wood. It is heavy and unbeautiful, a final, sharp weight pulling us both down into the dark■ #VSS365

She says, We'll split everything. Right down the middle like an apple. Then, like a hound, she hurries out the door with the wrong suitcase. All of a sudden, she is at the door banging for the right suitcase. And I look at my things strewn across the street like carrion■ #VSS365

She said she would come home with him. He said that his bed was dry as a riverbed. That together they could make a river. She liked how he said things. They started with their mouths. After, she said love is a grain, then a mountain. She wanted to know how far rain fell■#VSS365

The brightness yielded. A birth grain lodged in the whorl of his thumb. He loosened it and it drifted. A room returned, his mother’s body holding him again, the place before first breath and separation, before he knew his own name. The moon held him. He was inside it■ #vss365

The moon answered by folding its light inward. What had been surface became depth, and depth became step. He placed his foot upon a brightness that did not resist him. The sea pulled below, but less than before. Cheek to cheek with the moon, nothing remained between them■#VSS365