YOU AND YOU I know exactly how to touch you, how to slide my finger down your forehead and moist nose, then tickle you under your chin with four of my fingers; I glide down your back navigating the abacus of your spine as you turn over and lie back in unabridged bliss, woofing. I tickle your nipples and softly caress your furry belly. I know exactly how to touch you, how to shelter your clawed hands in mine, I dab concealer onto your eyebags with my second finger then, using my whole hand like a spider, massage your grey scalp until you murmur wordlessly. I slap my hand on your back during one of your coughing fits and give you my arm to hold on as I become your walking stick. TRANSGRESSION It wasn't the shock of him saying it. It was the shock of my reaction - " I just do it to kill time." KILL TIME? AT OUR AGE? Killing time is for twentysomethings with long hair and journals and daisychain dreams, or for the terminally ill, drinking regret on the rocks. I felt an electric numbness -- he had taken time in vain. When the hourglass sand begins to look bottom-heavy, then a year begins to feel like a month. Like a crack addict, all you want is more. I wanted to shake him, screech some sense into him, but it was his time to lose, not mine. GIOVANNI I can’t write a poem about you. It would be like flashing an emotional boob. We sit every week, talking, and I look at the curls in your beard dashed with grey. They seem to be a different formation every time, a different highlight, a different sign. It’s like interacting with a dynamic ancient Greek statue. The Vermeer light haloes in through the window to your right even when there is no sun, and the pink-brown skin of your face shimmers with optimism and comfort. Our conversation is sprinkled with ancient languages, modern dilemmas, and each other’s violent Netflix recommendations. We could have a timeless friendship except I signed a contract that we can’t be friends. It is so easy to read too much into cultural commonalities and humorous asides. So I do. We are both very Latin and very English at the same time, with veins of sarcasm pulsating at the temples. Maybe we are modern day explorers destined to meet like Livingstone and Stanley in Africa. I don’t love you. I don’t think you’re perfect. You leak grumpiness as you listen. Your feminism is mild. But. And we haven’t even met.
Caroline Am Bergris is a half-Colombian, half-Pakistani poet living in London. Her poems have been published, online and in print, in Europe and America.
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