Sophie van Waardenberg
propagate the zz plant by simply separating the rhizomes and repotting
you are doing such a good job for me
green monster of staying alive. all my friends
have left me to grow farms of their own.
even the saddest ones are selling virtual turnips
at a loss. it’s sunday night. the rain is fat
like a grandmother’s kiss and we can’t go out
to be loved by anybody. we can only make fertiliser
out of pixelated sap. but in the material world I’ve dusted
your perfect leaves, baby. what a year it’s been since fall.
I water you sometimes. if I die of this, I die of this.
whatever you do, don’t touch
I’m sorry—I’d rather not belabour the circuitous and unimportant troubles of living in a body, but some days living in a body is all I do. I should launder my pillowcases every second day. I should not plunge chin-first into a bulk-bought barrel of salicylic acid. I should wash my face with warm water, not hot water, not cold; with bare hands; with care. and I do. but my cheeks are riddled with tiny boils. I don’t look in the mirror before I turn the light off. this is why I talk to you from the dark. imagine me without these limbs, this face: a simple glob of soul, poking my fingerless finger through your forehead. when each cyst has worn itself out I scrape off the dead skin that surrounds it, exactly the way I’m not supposed to, with my unsterile fingernails, and in the carpeted living room of near-dream, in a clearasil advertisement from the early 2000s, the clean voice of a handsome man asks, do you want soft skin? do you want soft skin? you do, I know. my face was once the softest thing I could offer.
enough
I suppose I could have done
the wooing, flannel-shirted
like a high country sheep farmer
in the winter baring thick
prickled thighs—but I have never
known such confidence. if I ever
birth a child, snatch a bouquet,
wear a thong, carry you
through an estuary with my arms,
if I ever build a pizza oven
for you out of bricks,
if I am ever satisfied with my life…
for now I clear a drawer,
split the final dose of milk.
girl, all giving is also losing,
and a bird gives its song
to another bird.
I am ready to live with you.
Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau and a current MFA candidate in poetry at Syracuse University, where she serves as an Editor-in-Chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook-length collection, does a potato have a heart?, was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in HAD (Hobart After Dark), Sweet Mammalian, Mimicry, and Best New Zealand Poems.