I Think My Poem About You is Unfinished,
says Sal. How so? I ask her, and she says,
there are just things I want to add. Like
how you suck your thumb, how you pace the room,
and how you smudge your eyeliner when you cry,
and your dresses, I’ve got them numbered,
I know each one. Her poem is the loveliest thing
I’ve ever read, I tell her – it’s perfect – and promise
I’ve got a poem in me for her too,
about how she sheds her skin, emerges
bold and sky-wild, when she performs her poetry,
how her loyalty is a floorless reservoir
and she lets me drink from it, swim in it;
how she’s never cruel to or about any dying organism
(not even the rat in the garden, despite our shared phobia).
How she’d be a sunflower if a sunflower
were a woman, how friendship is
when you tilt your chin and someone holds
a buttercup under it, laughs as the glow catches;
when someone tells you they’ve been teargassed
and you tell them of the boys at school
who mimed fucking you from behind,
of whom you still wear the handprints
like those you left in poster paint on the shut door
of the girls’ toilets, as if touching palms
with a non-existent ally. A poem, like a universe,
has no intrinsic maximum – we can never
write enough of each other. Sal and I
spend the night baking trays of baklava; dawn
is butter and honey, far headier than blossom.
I could smudge my eyeliner now, at the stove, with her
furling her hand around my elbow.
I stayed awake to know this love.
Olivia Tuck’s work has been published by the Poetry Society and Broken Sleep, and in several print and online journals. She was runner-up in the 2023 Jane Martin Poetry Prize awarded by Girton College Cambridge, and was longlisted for the 2022 Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize. She is an Associate Editor at Tears in the Fence and at Lighthouse. Her pamphlet Things Only Borderlines Know is out now with Black Rabbit Press.