grey pennant
[as taken from Dulux Paint]
speaks easy. vomits up love, that pigeon wing cootie catcher. how easy – run of garlic like a spat-out oyster on bruschetta. I snap the necks of all the men in my life and they fizz. fluster out like the sprinklers turning on. cement hardens underwater if undisturbed but I spill onto the caulking until the bath leaks. this grey fracturing. these double corniche ceilings sad without restraint. build an aqueduct with volcanic ash. tip it in loose and it all blows away. blow up love, that clamshell grey pennant. dull coin of fortune, always landing tails, all decisions (life, love, career) made as a marker of this. always the wrong one, but, hey, you committed. it’d be embarrassing not to go ahead now. make a life like this. make it highly pozzolanic. swap the weeks of all the moons. buy razor blade packets. sweep lime powder off the edges of the sink.
Chloe Elliott is based in Durham. She is the Gold winner of the 2020 Creative Future Writers’ Award, has poetry in Bad Betty’s ‘Survival’ Anthology, Birmingham Literary Journal and work forthcoming with Bedtime Stories for the End of the World.