peter lacy
you beg me to saturate you like oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber just a whiff of torso
a lungful of animalic notes my bones smell smoky & powdery against yours don’t
magnetise yourself I prefer you smaller than a nail scar I miss all the glitter and colour
inside your mouth inside the wound where your head should be you’re my little moth
I’ll piggyback you upstairs if you’re too drunk your candlewick lips make me forget
about watches the ones you steal for a living the ones you trade for dust & cotton wool
I can’t sit with my back to a window at night without thinking of your eyelashes
beating against the skin of my neck they say truncation is a form of visual suffocation
they say you can capture the not-whole to me it looks like an abbatoir to you it’s a church
Italo Ferrante (he/him) is a queer poet who earned a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Warwick. To date, his work has been selected for publication by Poetry Salzburg, Impossible Archetype, Cardiff Review, Sage Cigarettes, Inflections Magazine, Lighthouse, and Orchard Lea Press. Recently, his poem Ode to Abruzzo has been shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes’ International Poetry Competition (2022).