Freya Turnbull
Mussel Mass
all the new lovers are open-lipped as mussels
on street corners, twined ligament and muscle.
august was muscle-tough, so i cut that
mother-of-pearl with my snapper card and took
its lines into my protein matrix.
i was told i had withered away my mussel-heart
by a doctor for recovering exoskeletons
but i took you into every muscle of me like
saltwater kissing open mussel shells
and these muscles beat despite themselves
mussels do not have brains; i am trying to learn from them.
it is summer and this time i promise to do it right. do it stronger.
Self-Portraits
what they don’t tell you is that there will always be a teenage girl in your house. in your lipstick smears on the mirror and the glitter in your eyeball. messy and violent, she is in your bedside table and your shortest skirt, in your cracked lips and your missed calls. you don’t know whether to kill her or stroke her hair for what she has done to you. for what has been done to her. she is the snap and hiss of apple skin in your mouth and she is in the walk you take to atone for eating it. she writes poetry on your bed and glues your eyelashes on for you. you wash her hair and make her eat. you let her live here because you don’t know what you would do without her, her quick grin, her sour mouth, her sprint to your best friend’s car, ready to ride.
ApocaLypse Checklist
when the end comes, i will exercise
the tendons at the back of my throat that pull
when i tell someone i love them.
it will all turn to milk before it’s over.
i will be the brokedown backwood brick stacks that are swallowed
into the stained glass sky shattering on the city. all the pearls will be spat up.
the clams won’t need them anymore.
i will try to find a name for us and come up empty-mouthed and joyful.
the licked-thin lockjaw land loose and lovely as it makes space for us,
stretching like a womb preparing to expel us like so many cells.
one final möbius strip of sweat and sigh as the apartment complexes rise
to the occasion, the open hip bones of the ocean bending like playdough.
so come lay down with me,
make a libation of me in the crumbling dirt,
help me carry oxygen through the mountains
that speak the old scripture:
glory be to hickeyed inner thighs,
to the gay bar,
to little deaths and curtain calls.
Freya Turnbull is a poet, student, and aspiring spectre based in Pōneke. Her work has been featured in a number of publications, most recently Turbine|Kapohau, the New Zealand Poetry Society anthology, and others. She owns a lot of weird dolls and takes fashion cues from them too.