Sliced (a cut-up poem)
you come home from New York City
and a love affair you kept
on a lowish heat
I shot a video
the footage is so sick
smelling of the fancy, short drinks
to where I refrigerate
under January milky ways
And we practice
the gentlest of improvisations
The vanilla extract
of your Egyptian cotton
offers a moment’s penetration
of my 5&10 cheap perfumes,
a far-cry from
sweet lip flesh
Meanwhile I have found
drinks, like men
are often quite strong
and come in almost any flavour
once you scooped me up
like a blob of cream
to place on top
telling them
I like the sweet
fall of her
And we practiced
black ideas
in the middle of heaven
we spill like warm milk
onto the sheets
Stirring in the satin cream
that is our bed
where love is whisked alive
You are yet to comment
on my changing hair colour
but sieve in the lies
to soothe the sudden burst
of my eyes’ hot peppers
We are clingfilmed
into doom
billboard calls
grace-wise
I gnaw your bastardely face
with my eyes
You reach out but find only
ribs, ribs, ribs
parading my troubles
I linger on your arm where
a darker skin is forming
I rest on its chocolate surface
hiding from my own
fluorescent sun
my cheek has been tweaked
on the threshold
and the serpent of my joy
keeps sliding
without preciousness
out of my doors
Filippa Bahrke is 24, and an English Lit and Creative Writing graduate from Greenwich University. She’s previously been featured in the student magazine, and won the PNSEL Poetry Prize. Filippa is a native Swede, and is soon moving to Paris.