Caroline Shepherd
Crush Poem!
I like you!
I like you so much I lie face down in the bucket fountain and don’t even move when a bunch of twelve-year-old boys spit on me on their way home from school!
I like you so much I move! to Dunedin! So I never have to see you again!
Only then, I commute every day to still pretend to run into you when you get your coffee.
I like you so much I stress eat the contents of a piñata while blasting ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’!
Until my neighbour comes downstairs to tell me that it’s June! And to please shut up!
I like you so much I fantasise about climbing inside the New World chest freezer
next to the mixed berries! Because I really need a lie down!
Exhausted! by the business of liking you!
I like you so much I give myself an iron deficiency! My doctor says this is actually because
my diet consists only of gummy snakes and bread but I do not believe him!
I know that somehow this, like all things, is your fault!
I like you so much I try cartwheeling to impress you only then I sprain my wrist!
This does not impress you! It makes you laugh! Which is better.
I like you so much I wade into the fat ocean and scream your name very loudly
for no one but me and/or the sea aliens and/or secret submarines!
I like you so much I almost say so!
And then, thankfully, I get a grip.
universal themes
the most gutting thing about being an adult aside from having to hang
the washing out obviously
is that nothing is universal and every idea
you thought was impossibly solid, unshakable, is not only shakeable but shaken
frequently and with abandon, like a drunk girl’s polaroid
nothing you believe is poured in concrete
people kill and lie and like almond milk
all of this, equally unfathomable
we really are just all here, walking around,
united only by biology and not liking to wait in lines at the airport
joined by the petty and the primal
maybe that can be the good bit
how we’re all full of bone and blood and a pulse,
that strange fluke, running quick through you and everyone
as you hang your stupid clothes out on the line
7 pm
The sky is purpleblue and maybe I’m going to be alright for real
like butter toast, good in theory and in practice
Right now I love the world and I’m so sure of it
how right things had to go for me to be here, with light touching me,
the sky more mellow than any bruise
In the evening all the things I forgot in the day,
that I am loved and lucky, come drifting back
and I stand a chance again
Caroline Shepherd is trying to get a BA and has been published in Mimicry and Starling. Her ninth birthday party was at a roller rink.