(best viewed on desktop/tablet, for best view on mobile please click here)
Chance Meeting
He cups a handful of my hair and looks surprised when it drips down from his hand in spirals of sea water. You’re walking far, far, beneath and
it always burns to breath in crystallised salts.
In the deepness born of the shock of it
you watch them unfold: the blinding light of all things primordial.
Memories breathing, blooming, nestled tight
in the very depths of your skull.
He tells me how terror can make a home in the hollows of our collarbones,
how it settles in, shivers in time with the heartbeat,
furls further inside each pearl of concave darkness.
I wash my bedsheets in bleach,
over, and over, and over.
The finality of it, unnoticed
Daze-Drunk
and so—prayers crushed to lips like
petals, boiled, turning sharp to rose-water.
Shivers in crushed diamonds. The smell, overpowering. Blinding.
A fumigation of all
that is heady, thick. Foaming fumes of smoke
to choke and burn in the crackling
of chest bones, in the roar of rose-water
rivers. To look up from beneath all that was promised–
what do you see? To look up as the sky heaves, as it bursts
open with the scent of burned fuchsia. It will hold the words
tight and savage between its teeth. Open
your mouth, darling, and the burn
will be as promised: tongue slicing bright along the fountains of stars.
Insomnia
The fabric of the night seemed to split apart for a moment. I thought, morning is here, but when I looked out the streets were empty and dark and clocks were stuck.
It builds slowly: During the day there are too many but now— now there is space, and you
breathe in, and your very lungs tremble and shake their little fists up at the sky.
Excisions in the heavy blackness that sits in the corners of your room
A silence frozen over with ringing.
Julia is a King’s College London graduate student with two degrees in Literature and Digital Studies: she’s currently working on her dissertation while running a small literary journal. She was born in Ukraine, but grew up in the south of Spain. She loves reading in the sun and writing when everyone’s asleep.
photo by Viktor Talashuk and Jairo Alzate (via unsplash)
Crow & Cross Keys 