i’m writing to say everything is well (almost).
writing to say that purgatory is a sonnet if you find a way out of it.
i’m writing to say i miss the pōneke skies of that 2015 in all
their hues of blue and grey, that i miss seeing your face
in the hospital corridors, that i miss seeing your face.
that i’m glad you saved your own life, so at least we had
eight more years. that i went back to pōneke but it turns out
what makes a place is not the place at all. i swear that sometimes
i hear you say my old name, and it sobers me. no one else could
make it tender, but you. no one else could get me out of purgatory
with only the ghost of them. and i’m writing to say everything is well,
(almost).

i’m writing to say i think i’ve finally found it.
what we were looking for when they put electrode stickers
on my brain and shocking it, what they put you on cocktails
of medicine because you could not find.
i’m writing looking back. pain is almost beautiful
once you’ve killed it. look at what’s become of it.
everything. look at this version where icarus is bathed in light
but not burned by it. see my hands, they do not wage war on me,
but they do miss you. see they’re reaching and writing.
see losing you when your life was beginning, really,
made me want to die / made me want to live.

see the pōneke skies were a mirror to these of tāmaki,
see somehow your ghost is still teaching me to crawl out into life,
see the guilt is a hat trick that ends with tenderness.
if you let it. a rabbit’s ear. a memory.
the prey becomes the prayer. the sobering becomes the sombre.
i’m writing to say purgatory spat me out and i’ve been on my knees
without you. but what once was a stance of repentance
is now a reminder to let the soft animal of my body love.
i’m writing to say the animal of it remembers, could never forget.
looks at the baby blue skies of summer and loves you.

looks at the place and searches for the people who will make me miss it.
looks at purgatory as a sonnet of grief that turned me tender as the flesh.
i’m writing to say the sun is beautiful but i promise not to burn.
to say i’ll live for the both of us because you taught me how.
to say, i hope that when i wake to the thick honey light, made
new again into the womb of summer, that it is a mirror to the otherside.
i’m writing to say i’m wondering about the view, is it beautiful,
over there?

is it as still and soft as we had hoped? is death a hat-trick?
does it reveal something tender?
you showed me how to love and then you taught me how to live.
i’m writing to say everything is well, so very beautiful,
light all through me, but i confess, i am still hoping for one final trick.
a sleight of hand. a joker that says after all this, it isn’t true.
you’re not dead. we could laugh out a whole evening over this
just like we used to.

when we were children, we squeezed into a single bed
my head on the pillow and yours at the other end
you laughed as my ankles tickled your neck,
in those days i didn’t know two girls could be anything
more than horizontal bodies and faces that didn’t touch

i wanted to be someone who fell in love
you wanted to be someone who obeyed god
i tried to send up a prayer,
please dear god, find me someone whose face i can be close to
that same year i chopped my hair to my earlobes

it started to fall out in the months before, i told you
it wasn’t all of the truth
but how do you say help me,
i am afraid because i have butterflies in my ankles
how do you say help me,
i think prayers are getting trapped in the clouds
stuck in a transcendental post office

if we were still children i would have said, ‘i want to play romeo’
and perhaps you would have understood it then
before you loved any god, you loved me
but we are almost two decades old when i say
bleary eyed and staticy on the phone
i am in love with a girl

in this version it is juliet and juliet
it is romeo and romeo,
in this version she chops my hair in the bathroom mirror
shedding me free of it with sewing scissors
i do not have to explain these things anymore

when her forehead touches mine, it is a prayer
please dear god, if love can’t be between two girls
then i don’t know if we’ve got the definition of love right yet
in this version you leave what i have found in the transcendental post office

a letter, unopened
i wrote about juliet and juilet, falling in love
living happily ever after
praying definitions of love might expand

to her and to me, our love is love, which is someone whose
forehead pressed against yours, feels like a prayer

wept, not beautifully, wept with my knees up
with my chest heaving, with my tears blotting
the wooden floors in my bedroom, noticed
my ceiling for the first time, the way it rises
and falls, like a breath, i have forgotten how

it felt to want to live in the world, without fearing it
but not the way you said my name
almost childlike. so sweetly
i have texted your dad and thought about
running the car into the concrete wall
by the mcdonalds parking lot

thought about how to live a life without you
about how the death of a stranger is like losing
you again, in a different font
forgotten to take my meds / started taking them again
thrown up in the toilet, stopped kissing people
texted your dad, again

changed the dedication of my poetry book to your name
called in sick to work, the flu, a stomach bug
a dead best friend- is there a prescription for that?
no. googled the french phrase tu me manques
wondered where i first heard it

taken pills for sleep and pills for nausea and
pills to stop my heart beating so fast,
thought about what it means, that i want my heart to slow
and yours to start
punched a wall, punched a pillow, thrown white plates at
white walls
almost picked up the shards to make mosaics
decided that’s the kind of thing i would’ve only done before

hugged your mother and your father and your grandmother
and both of your brothers, and your boyfriend
braided my hair, the way you used to
painted my nails the blue you chose
when we got them done together

wept, when it chipped off
lost the ability to weep, lost the ability to text back
wished i believed in god
wrote you letters, with questions
knowing you can’t write back
wondered if when the doctor sees my wrists
she reads the old news reports across them
and worries more than she usually would
wondered if the nurse drawing my blood has
ever lost her best friend

texted your dad, again
almost called the crisis line,
wondered when everything
will stop feeling like a crisis
bought pet rats

gone through a break up
asked my mother to stop messaging me so often
wrote your name in sticks at the pond
wrote poetry without the energy to wonder if it was good
tried to claw out of this universe like a

forgive me, i couldn’t think of metaphors
so i googled that phrase
someone on reddit says, it feels like her baby is
trying to claw out of her cervix
yes, like that, perhaps,
with my knees up, and my cheeks stained
thinking, this is not the right version of this story
this is not the right version of this story

wondered if whether you enter a new world
the light is always too bright, wondered if it always
feels like the apocalypse starts, right after that
wondered if dying feels like the lights going out,
opened my phone and scrolled to your name, before remembering

everything is a reminder, and still yet,
here i am forgetting, everything is a memory,
and yet i have amnesia
tu me manques means you are missing from me
i’m a poet and i’ve tried
but it comes down to those three words
and, i suppose, no one is better at the french
then writing about love.

returning feels like an apology
it is written in the blue, hazy horizon
lines, it is written in cold mornings
on the frost that collects like dust on
the windows, i think i should write more,
but i never do, i have skeletons
here i never disposed of
i worry that there is only pain
and nothing to come of it, i worry
that i am trying to talk of healing while
still shuffling forward on a cliff face
in my dreams, or nightmares
i never learnt the difference, really
i’m fifteen, i’m twenty-three, i’m eleven
tangled in time, webbing on my skin
i am writing apologies to a city
my skeletons still haunt
what is palpable except fear
what is moving on except looking at the sky
and yearning for how it looked elsewhere.