Giselle den Breems
First Love, Forgive the Fantasies
I imagine you dying
because I’ve imagined
sleeping with you too many times
and I’m sorry.
I imagine you sleeping.
Despite everything, my body
won’t hold onto the warmth of your skin.
You are leaving your body;
we are growing cold and quiet.
deathbed first love the Earth
the sheets you make me so lonely
you make me
I’m crying in the hospital café
and I can’t imagine such emptiness.
There is nothing but the blue rain
and the yellow sky and the green dusk,
the green darkness of trees in dusk.
And I am just as alone as I was before.
Despite everything, my body
won’t remember what I need it to.
Sit with me while I eat; you fill me.
I taste nothing. I watch.
I go still when you speak.
Bedside: I’m watching you go still.
I haven’t waited this long only to break
my silence. We whisper
so as not to remind anyone we’re here.
I bring you a different flower every day:
tulip, sunflower, sweet pea, snowdrop —
an infant’s hand cupped and set in white clay,
a bell a kiss a tear
I imagine your warmth
because I can’t remember it.
You are still water when you speak.
I drink lying on my back
liable to choke
I won’t look at your eyes for
as long as I want to — I could study them
but I can’t have you
seeing me.
My stomach and cheeks, hot with fear,
ache for your shelter, ache through your sleep.
You terrify me you make me
terrify myself.
The last hot breath, soft drama of death.
I’m here, the only one left in the room.
The place where you lie gapes.
Forgive me forgive the fantasies.
This will all be yours
The hour turns gold, then red, then blue.
I hold it carefully in cupped hands, in cupped body.
Awfully soon, she sleeps in fever. The body is a sickle.
The wheat is gold and tough. The field is dark.
Duck down and no one can see you. Hands in the earth.
Stagger. Curled on a dark wood floor in candlelight,
child, infant, animal. Wood plus moon plus wax
plus red — the red that means alive
or used to be alive or going to be alive:
all that is held in my girl’s body. A blood moon is never
as red as they say it will be.
The onlookers are fervid with the melodrama of dying,
but it is just a body that has stopped working,
just meat and skin and bone on dirt / wood.
Admire. Even the bloodshed is beautiful in candlelight,
even rot is sweet in the clean night air. The brown earth, the trees.
One day, this will all be yours and I can’t have you afraid.
Giselle den Breems began writing poems when she was six. Her first one was titled ‘The Cloud Bird’. Now she is seventeen and her poems are a lot sadder. Her work can also be found in Starling Issue 14 and Symposia Issue 1.