Sweetdark

Savannah Brown

First published 2020
1st edition / 01

ISBN: 978-1-5272-6892-0

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by CPI Group

Cover art by Agnes Cecile
Force of Gravitational Attraction, 2019

www.savbrown.com

to the sweetdarks i have known / will know / know

CONTENTS

void/you
we are the fledglings
the universe may stop expanding in five billion years
too hostile too ticking
the difference
an impeccable functional design
if i've ever made something beautiful
enough
the eternity we share
autopsy, performed gasping
tell me like you mean it
trick of the black light

II.

the parakeets which fly in greenwich park
view including cable cars
a growing thing
spring of the body
rarities
observation
folie a deux
in anticipation of the hydrogen bomb
me, covered in ash
fifty-two blue

III.

bloodsucker
earthly pleasures!
impact
low-level annihilation
ego
me, barefaced, in the sycamore
promise
i want you to look at the moon
on the last day, i can't help
my own small ruin
this too shall devastate
a memory

notes & acknowledgments

I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.

Ada Limón

VOID/YOU

here’s what acquaints you with nature’s dark apathy.
only a child, but one look at the atlantic in flux

is enough to know that’s where you’re meant to pitch your body,
primally, the truth of it written on some hidden artifact, ancient

and yours. do you know the weight of infinite stinging atoms,
the ones you want to love, bent on your destruction? you’ll learn,

ribbony girl limbs pinned for a little lifetime to the sandbar,
your fresh reality that angry lunar rush, crushed chest, your spasming

lungs, tongue brine-sour, young panic. there it is: now you know love
doesn’t cut it. followed by: now you know you can die. and what

are you gonna do about it, huh? first, surface, back into the bleached
midday. hack. the sun snaps above you, like fingers. stagger

out, pursued, little freckle-dusted seraph. mom brings the reckoning,
but it could’ve been anyone, a stranger, or what some people call

god. do you cry? which is you, which is sea? mom says i won’t
have you afraid of the ocean. then she says get back in.

and you do.

it doesn’t matter how, whether or not you shudder at the web-
toed chill or what it promises. if you don’t remember,

you tread until sunset and the world doesn’t end. years
pass, in their quick and unnoticed way. on your left hip,

a scar, tawny and grained, like martian soil, and what’s left
to forgive? not the moon, the earthblood, the only blue being

into which you can slip unknown and unknowable—maybe
just as wronged. but the fear needs somewhere to go, intersecting

obliterations now round every corner, the silver magnetic mass,
formless, not creatable or destroyable, always churning—and where

is judgment day? i won’t have you afraid of clock hands.
not of your own unfamiliar reflection. not the hapless lonely wander,

of your skull not as home but ivory cage, of your own pain, given pain,
needless pain—fine, then. again. go again, horizon-eyed. step into

the tide of a trillion tomorrows, crush below the wet and pulverized
mess spat by each frothing horror, and wade into the dark, like water.

WE ARE THE FLEDGLINGS

when even this lurid hour drops the leash—
that’s how i know the night is going well.
there’s no more left to lose. what sharps?
what aloof, protective mystery? what home?

the caper’s third haunt, in one of those old
man pubs, our heads thrown back in the mahogany-
choke and mold colony, darts thumping,
tables sticky and seeping ale and fine, i’ll play
sweetie, i’ll play pet, i’ll play love. if i blush,
and peach hasn’t shouldered itself through the heavy
dim, have i blushed?

before i stand to reach you all, my thighs cling
to the booth leather and pop free.

the unvisitable place, which is not a place, which
is a feeling, which is an inimitable feeling—
hollering, self-wooing succubi—

a bottle shatters at the bar and i’m scared
to link our fingers in case it was really the collapse
of our own breakable thing, our tenderglass
worth naming but too weak to survive ultraviolet
gaze, obliterated by the rattle of one line
spoken too gently.

tell you what: i’d traverse the shards
barefoot to keep this going, then jar
the consequence as a souvenir.

after the yellow hours offer their timid
ought-to’s we invent a new twisted
collection of sounds that fold themselves
into the wooden nooks, different words
for the same shriek:
we were here, so far from death.

THE UNIVERSE MAY STOP EXPANDING IN FIVE BILLION YEARS

at which point time will cease
to exist and i can finally stop
complaining. there’s a fragile
world reflected in the glassy
pearl of your spit left
on my belly and i’m telling
you, i’ve never been so
old. the day sucks with leech-
teeth. even given the shreds
of your dead rind caked under
my fingernails there’s the black
chasm of want expanding
in my chest the way a bead
of ink breaks, making me difficult
to touch without an exit plan.
imagine, please, a better
continuum. you say earlier
doesn’t feel real and you’re right,
not because there was anything
exceptional about the heath
in early afternoon, not because
our chins sticky with cider
was a notable pip in this
quivering glitch of a life,
but because it was too ordinary
to even dare remember,
because we’ll someday ache
for any regular sunday in june
where the sun was a sure
thing and breath tasted like warm
grass and there was not a single
indication the cosmos would one
day shut like your eyes, tight
with pleasure.

TOO HOSTILE TOO TICKING

summer’s corpse breath
has me whirring mad across the inanimate

bridge from canning town to the docks.
i'm less than nuisance. less than dust. there’s passing

regard of the gut-knuckled wind, ricocheted
from half-scrapers and cranes and fellow

faceless travelers, which, yeah, if you need
to know, makes me think of the pavement

doused in the copper blaze of fantasy blood
spatter, like, i wanna snuff out some of that magic

god-given stuff with my hands, that’s how bad
this is. the gossamer blot which begins in my gums

which is me but not me says everything is ruined
and it is. mouth rinsed in hot dread. i need to never

be touched again. i need every human body stacked
on top of mine, crushing. still, there’s always light:

the tessellated dark matter, rootless stars and me,
on fire. quick, a riddle: which phenomenon

is capable of producing the fiercest rage, yet cares
the least about it? the walk home from the night

bus takes ten minutes and somehow
i don’t appreciate a damned second.

THE DIFFERENCE

today the sun drenched
a shadowless soul
spilt over with calm
and beginning;

still it drifts in the non-place
between the two:
feeling alive, and feeling
like living

AN IMPECCABLE FUNCTIONAL DESIGN

you, doomless and new, shake out the sock
full of the once-bodies of gastropods

and mollusks, soft animals, now softer.
left behind their permablacks, saw-toothed

manors of magnolia, sage, heather, pleated
peach and tangerine. i think of my own

biological paint: table cream, gunmetal,
the spent smear of oxidized copper scrubbed

from the sheets, the color of dirt—yes, fine,
i’m jealous of the dead things. i imagine the honor

of creating a keepsake with only with my body,
to leave behind, to be loved, long after,

and oh, we’re back! here it rages, the rotten
horse which breaknecks towards my frontal lobe,

come to seek the sole rider. smack my lips
while i still can to rile the bitter tang.

adages of the voidal trance: oil your face
(flesh-death) and peel the orange (flesh-death)

and fuck (flesh-death-flesh, by the way,
did you know, inside you, you can grow

a whole story of pain?) look around,
there’s never not a wrong organ, or something

sheathed in skin, something else to flay—
and that’s how this goes, careening in the curl

of an infinity i’ve been told can’t be hostile,
which doesn’t explain the scars, or the purple fat

which drips onto my cheeks. gentleness is often
enough—a long, blue breath. you hold the shells

as if they don’t belong to ghosts, so tame with what
you love. there’s one shaped like a corkscrew,

arched brushstrokes tightened into a dense
central point, straining like a shut eye, coiled

into itself, no—itself a coil, and so i decide this
is merely the way of things, spiraling. did you mean

to say infinity, or just a very large number? before this,
we walked to the far green. you smelled like orange

peels on the way, and there were lilies with three
petals and buttercups five and cosmos eight

and perhaps always in tandem there’s the certain
whirlpool, swirling on towards little oblivion.

IF I'VE EVER MADE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL

i.
it wasn’t on purpose. when the boy swears god
loves me i think i have not even met the guy
but sure, i’d like to, so this is how i’ll spend
the impossible day, captive in a beater driving
down west market as he says look at all of this
gestures to a strip mall and tel me you don’t
believe in a creator

ii.
consider superglue. unintended headway penicillin
dynamite coca-cola champagne! wilhelm channels
a mystery ray and calls it x, not divine. a sparkling
current propels atom through atom, green disaster
blaze which deems the flesh extraneous, and the light
understands now. the broken particles, imagined,
dominated, even the intimacy too close as ghosts
of orderly black appear revealing what before
we’d had to bleed to know. sorry, sorry, what
had he been trying to do, again

iii.
i shouldn’t have been so hard on the strip mall. what
am i asking of it? it’s the point, anyway, that there’s sin
and miracle nothing else, and hey, i clock a robin folding
branches into the o’s of the sign on goodwill, where inside
someone buys a stranger’s blood-red confession
dress. i want the boy to define accident. then mistake.
for fun he’d rally creation and discovery, but look, i’d say,
don’t you feel it, when the sun casts shadows across
the ugliest parts of you, the senselessness, the stumbling,
our tipsy sleepwalk into ourselves, in the same instant
formed and found, and i blink the wet eyes that happen
to bore down to the marrow, looking for god, and discover
two-hundred off-white flecks of rubble, of what the earth
built with what was left of heaven.

ENOUGH

no maybe the ugliest hours shouldn’t host
miracles but still they go on hosting for example
this all happened while i was fumbling around

in the unnatural morning like a nocturnal
animal and you don’t have to believe me
i wouldn’t believe me but on the way home

the seagulls were laughing like kids

and i tipped my head to the day-moon which hung
translucent with a projection’s non-reality against
a sky so blue my teeth chattered and when i lay

face down beside the brook i swore
the earth flexed against my belly a degree
of a degree of a degree of a degree of a

crucial degree

THE ETERNITY WE SHARE

act as though you’ve just been granted immortality
and i’ll mirror the buzz. admit it, that’s what it’s like,
on golden-fluke mornings, or two glasses in, or dodging
the fidgety mayflies on erie, the day boiling fierce
in every direction. to be happy, sometimes, feels like
quitting. other times, only chemical, like when you brush
my chest so gently i assume you’re looking for a hair-thin
seam, or which rough spine to tug and send the whole wall
spinning in the direction of the hidden things—suddenly
there’s my heart, as bloody and heady as yours.
right now, we’re still. chins tilted towards the trace
of distant pinpricks sewn in orange, gulls as antishadows;
concurrent focus, as if into the eyes of something bigger.
as if we are the eyes. i decide joy to be the natural state
of the cosmos, the return to it some kind of entropic
fate. my skin practically puckers. each taste bud, a name.
this is so beautiful and there’s nothing i can do about it.
you are so beautiful and—understand, every night
the collective us sees seven billion sunsets. have you
even checked? really, really looked? say earth. know
the experience of saying it, how the letters together
behave like a cricket’s purr, earth, that honeyed thrum,
earth, so easy to breathe, earth, earth, earth. i don’t need
you to meet the rapt stagger. i don’t even need you
to remember. just know, now—seven billion sunsets
and here’s me, convinced we’re seeing the same one.

AUTOPSY, PERFORMED GASPING

i would have never forgiven
myself had i stepped on that stag
beetle. stark maroonish bullet
hole, pincers scratching against
the pavement gentle as a whisper,
in the city!—

i tel you about him and vow
to start watching my feet.

there's no time to gasp before
before you save me from the drop
and haul me the rest of the way
over the fence. today i’m convinced
by my own humanity, so much
a person. maybe i’ve fallen for a trick,
my mind’s protective char doing its job,
but hey, am i evolved or what!
meanwhile, the oaks ahead of us
unfurl like surgery curtains.

i’m thinking of a boy i remember
nothing about except his crime
when he, despite the girls’
pleading, slammed his awful
foot down onto the head
of what was once the praying
mantis, who popped like a berry,
all of this for no apparent reason
besides his having a foot
and her being there and our delicious
horror, and i never recovered
from the quiet racket her body
made, how substantial she appeared
at odds with how simply she died.

the daisies make space for us like a womb
and i keep telling you i could fall asleep.
what that means is i feel safe enough to lie
belly-up. what that means is this is unusual.

so it’s known, that first night
i slept beside you, i didn’t stir
a lick, not at all—

you untangle a branch from my hair,
clumsy and fond, and i know you weren’t
supposed to see me like this. the breathing,
i mean. bacteria making a real show of being
bacteria, of the pins stuck in all my one
hundred thready legs, understand,
it’s alleged that every eight years my cells are made new
and so how will you know
that this me is the one you love?

(alternate ideas: me greater,
draped fleshless round forever
or just the ripples born by the skipped
rock and not the rock herself—
instead, in the underfoot brambles
unskipped and pathetic / everything
soft and chewy-pink / like this syrupy
grapefruit we tease apart when we
speak / like i want to rough anything
with you until it spits acid / your lips
curl around my shoulder and it snaps
like a cicada / how mechanical
the processes to accomplish tender
things / you scribble at the silky
spider bite i can’t reach / i want you
to know that my hands tremble
like moth wings in a killing wind and)

there are still so many good
and steady ways to touch your face.

TELL ME LIKE YOU MEAN IT

before the worst of the red synapses cracks,
you remember the walls, and that no one knows
what it’s like in there. you’re trying to write

everything down. lay it out. endless three-card
solitaire, the canyon-gorged vinyls, every cursed
word you’ve let inside you which began safe

then grew, you’ve written them all, stony in the face
of obsession and rage, cuffed to the pursuit, lately,
of hobbies which promise to break skin, or slice

Sweetdark

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