To the Salmon I Ate at Christmas
I honestly thought it would be fine. I’d eaten other salmon—years ago—and thought I could eat you too. The tin was pink and fit snug in my palm as I carried you home. I admired your sleek vessel as you sat on my shelf between last summer’s cherries and the olives I had yet to open.
The time to prepare you arrived. Your scent filled my kitchen as I pierced your steel coffin. I drained your brine and lifted your lid, hit winded by your hacked, contorted body. My skin writhed against your supple flesh, your spine, each vertebra snap between fingers. The mangled ribs disordered in the bowl with every crack.
I pushed you deeper in my mind, down my throat, masking your fragrance with vinegar. That dead festive feeling clamped round my gums, offput only with that cheap kapusta. My guests merely tasted a morsel—the rest of you waiting in the fridge. I didn’t want to waste you, body given from the waters, so I continued to feast on your flesh. With each meal I forced myself to eat more of you, chew your tacky pulp, until only that oily residue on the tin-can casket gave hint that you were here.
It’s been some time and I still keep thinking of you. And yet I could not bear to look you in the eye.
Alex Mepham (they/them) is a PhD student investigating how background noise impacts speech understanding. Alex has work appearing in Magma, Dreich, Olit, Berlin Lit, and Modern Poetry in Translation among others. Alex lives in York, UK, and can be found at amepham.carrd.co.
Sat at L’eau à La Bouche after a Drag Sex Show
Honestly, the love was lost on us. The tread-worn slats,
the honeyed oak shelves lined with eyeball olives,
pimento sloppy in their jars like intestines, that awful red
feature wall which reminded me of our first non-council flat,
sweated bodies peeling out of their winter coats, and Christ all the fetid cheese.
We three, morose from vodka and gin, couldn’t hack it,
had to sit outside under the awning when the rain pummeled out the white sky
with our shoulders slung up, all wide and sleek
like the breast of a pigeon. Last night we were full of it — love,
that is — but daylight crystalised the cranberry juice mixer
as it always does, settles it sharp and eroding in the stomach,
the kind of tummy ache that makes you think I am sick of being lovely,
and so we are not. We say things like isn’t it weird how no one is interesting
and you can tell a lot about someone from their dog and when girls
who dress like us walk past with cement-block boots parting the snow,
we say nothing. I am affronted when people I stare at stare back,
the way I think ginger cats must always feel, so I look down
and through them at the dogs and at the stalls,
watch the bird-boned stature of one Irish wolfhound, the tight furrows
of its diamond quilted gilet, the tight-boned wrist of its owner
hold a wood-carved baby Jesus in the palm like a baseball bat
and run a nail through the folds between him and the manger
and I turn to Mel, I say Mel, was the fisting everything you dreamed?
Adriano Noble is a writer currently based in London. His work has been featured in The Hellebore, Hungry Ghost Magazine, fourteen poems and Rust & Moth. He has also been shortlisted for the Creative Future Writers’ Award. He can be found on twitter @no_ao_.