By Bex Hainsworth
I don’t remember the exact second I fell in love with you.
I seem to recall, instead, September’s hazy smiles, how it hid
gold teeth behind leafy fingers, as if it knew a secret.
There was the sweet bite of iced coffee and the crackle
of brown paper bags. Autumn placed ‘I love you’
in the back pages of my mind like a small ad.
*
I have dreams about bright rooms, that soon they
will tap and zap and sap the life right out of me,
trying to understand. A white coat will hold up a scan,
wave it like a flag, and your eyes will emerge
in the neon butterfly of my brain.
He will know: you have hooked
onto my every nerve. Your name
has grown in my mouth like a second tongue.
*
Before you, hours of smashed bulbs and sunlight.
On a southern beach I found a starfish
with one amputated limb. It sat on a rock
like a chromosome, and I lay next to it,
pretending we were a string of DNA.
Now, such simple days are a rumour:
I am not sure if I believe in their existence.
Mermaid days at the bottom of an hourglass.
*
January saw I was slipping away
so it dug ice-picks into my shoulder blades
and dragged me back across the snow.
My exhausted, frostbitten brain couldn’t
take the strain and it longed for the leaves
on the railway line. My arms began negotiations
with sharp edges. But I somehow survived the winter:
a fond memory leant against my door like a snow shovel.
*
I have gone away, across borders, over bridges.
I have waited patiently enough. But I do not
understand the physics of falling out of love.
The equations and formulas of such a descent
are beyond me. I cannot calculate the needed
velocity – only the amount of counter-attack.
All I know is Love is tidal: when I think it has
ebbed away, it suddenly comes rushing back.
Bex Hainsworth (she/her) is a bisexual poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Ethel Zine, Atrium, Okay Donkey, Acropolis Journal, and Brave Voices Magazine. Find her on Twitter @PoetBex.
