Ame McLachlan
my love
and for you, my love, i can be;
for you, my love, i will be
joyfully sir like a knight,
clad in plate and joust
with my femininity
and contently ma’am,
corsettedly rhododendron
in my masculinity.
and for you, my love,
you may call me what you will,
but please,
for me,
my love,
leave me knowing i never existed,
concretely,
at all.
cold tap (for meg)
the cold tap pressed between the notches of your back,
a punishment for a battle lost,
over who gets the tap-less end of the bath
eventually you yielded, volunteering yourself to save your sister from her fear
of getting sucked down the plug hole
and washed away
and the older you get
the more you understand the fear –
you know the ache in your shoulders is in the bone,
muscles spread thin and worn from carrying
all the little secrets and all the little truths
(for all the little lies carried themselves)
and now you long for that massage between the notches of your back,
of the cold tap pressing,
to ground you into the wet physicality
of a body misunderstood and innocent
trialled and convicted as guilty in a courtroom of only yourself,
yet heroic in the eyes of your sister.
out of office
like a child’s science project volcano
that only exists in cliche american films,
greedily devoured in the netflix-filled hours
where the only two lines are
“let’s get outta here” and
“i love you, dad” –
it fizzes away beneath my ribs
filling the crevices of my body
with foam and vinegar waste,
chemicals spilt in my cavities –
as per my last email,
the devastation of a personal oil spill
is contained to my one, singular person.
therefore, i would like to announce
that i am “out of office”
and i have set up an automated email
to run forever while i –
determined to crack myself open
like a stubborn peanut shell –
wish to spill out the slick slime of my fear
into the cold november earth,
and lay resting in peace with my viscera slopped out
under a blanket of moss and mushrooms –
slinking back to the bog from where one of us (cc’d) once crawled from,
(and had i have known there’d be days like this),
i would’ve ensured that i remained tucked up
in a primordial peat bed.
so i am out of office!
and i will reply to your email upon my eventual return
unless it is very important,
in which case i will respond right away, sir,
right away,
since i will keep one eye on my emails because,
as aforementioned,
see science project volcano metaphor (attached to this poem).
Ame (they/them) is a queer writer and editor of poetry and fiction based in Nottingham, England. They love to explore the surreal magic beneath the mundane routine of everyday life in their work and opt to walk the path most strange. They can be found skulking around on Twitter and Instagram @amemclachlan.