You appeared at my gingerbread door
last summer. Your lips were mulberry-stained,
your cigarette a chocolate finger between them.

A carpet bag hung from your cinder toffee wrist.
Each of your eyes was a walnut half.
You touched my hair’s spaghetti strands;

held a shot glass to my tears and drank
as you pinched two thousand days’ worth
of pink blancmange quivering from my hips.

You stayed six weeks. We dreamt of nibbling
around the edges of the morbidly obese moon
(built with Blacksticks Blue). Snapped

barley sugar gutters from the roof,
crunching them in your claws, never my teeth –
like we were fourteen again, and caught

inside the deep-fried Mars bar breath
of close August nights. Each time the sky belched,
you’d press yourself tight to my spine.

Breaking, breaking, breaking up
the collecting dusk, you whispered,
I will love the bones of you.

Your phalanges made their acid drop bruises
along my neurons. When I kissed your jaw, I tasted
ice. Rust. Shadows. Moss against granite.

Olivia Tuck has had poems and prose published in literary journals and webzines including The Interpreter’s House, Lighthouse, Amaryllis and Three Drops from a Cauldron. Her work also featured in Please Hear What I’m Not Saying, a charity poetry anthology on the subject of mental health, and she has been Highly Commended and shortlisted in one or two short story competitions. She is due to start at Bath Spa University this autumn, to study for a BA in Creative Writing. Find her on Twitter: @livtuckwrites