“…the mutability of a body defined as inexhaustibly interchangeable, an inhabitation of the virtually uninhabitable, being within the zone of non-being. ”

Kombucha

I have learned to drink of this like a fine kombucha. This body-warm drink, mud at the bottom of the mooncup. For a year I carried you with me. The sign at the storage unit said ‘no food, no perishables’, but I kept you in that box, each bottle in the little clay tray. The blood was growing one grey bubble into the neck of the bottle. It was you. As you as you are. Blood fur from the time your body was made. They say that we exist inside our mother’s sac of eggs when she is but a sac of eggs laid inside her mother. When I stare at these bottles, it’s blood that has been three times enlarged. Who says we have no genealogy? Who says that if I line them up, as ornaments, a blood archive, then it isn’t like us having had a child? The last I have of you: old blood, homebrew.

Peg

Tonight we are boys together. Now I understand

why for brothers postcodes rule. These looks

are not friendly. Two boys, one suspiciously short,

touching elbows as we walk past the KFC,

down Coldharbour Lane, with streets lit

like an outdoor stage; under the bridge, past the

behemoth of Somerleyton, past the

houses that have been empty since the eighties;

I turn to look at death painted fifty feet high,

a skeletal foot on each building, birds following

a fatalistic hand. We walk by the off license,

past Valencia, deserted, down to the dark origin

of Shakespeare Road.

This bus stop might be the first outpost to the underworld.

It’s a summer night and you smell good.

Of yourself. Nut-like. Sour dough sweat.

We go to the top deck and sit up front.

The bus heaves past Loughborough, to Camberwell,

to the green, buzzing with students drunk on Friday,

drunk on art and trendy and young; wine bottle young,

rollie-young, tight, flat-chested young. I follow you down,

I follow you up to the stairs to your flat, your back,

your hips, up, to a bedroom overlooking South London,

it whispers, undress,

undress, we don’t need to speak –

speak with your clothes, say it in the sound of your shirt

falling to the floor; we agreed on this hours ago.

We had the idea years ago. Now we are boys together. Bend.

Pride

I am seventeen, summer is still gold clap of hot body

and hot body. Blue sky fries the tiny sun.

I kiss myself for courage and duck into the parade.

Two dykes smiling like young mothers ask me my name.

Our gazes lock on love, our slow wend among the cut offs,

wrecked docs, glinting nose rings, heads shaved to skin,

a stranger’s hand on my shoulder became a loving mouth

pressing its heat into mine, urgent tongue searching for a place