It’s like
Running your fingertips over
a grater. Gently, not hard enough to slice
But enough that it sets your
Teeth on edge
Skin catching, vulnerable 
I don’t like being on this edge
That what talking to you does to me
These days
How do I take my fingers off the metal

Finding your mouth
In this tangle of bodies
Like coming home
Limbs wrapping around us

My fingertips know you
Even when there are choices

Until time changes us
Please let me keep learning you

This poem is about me trying 
to find something in myself that
makes me proud of who I am
becoming as I try  
to Reconfigure
myself to fit
what I said
I want,
Then

melancholic girl
craves to live
on the edge of the ocean
to be on the fringe of that oppressive 

               bliss

but probably shouldn’t 

she’d probably get sucked in
she already feels the siren call

My Body

Is strong, fit, capable
I can hold a human above my head
Can hold myself, upside down, standing on 
                           my hands

I can climb a mountain
Power through the ocean
I can hold people, give them comfort
Be a soft surface
Be a hard restraint 

So imagine how pointless it is
To say ‘wow Emily, I think you have lost weight’
Is a number all that matters?
When I am saving someones life
Or helping someone put their lives back together 

Why is the 215lbs the thing that matters
When the thing that impacts the world is 
                         my actions

Today I am tired
Everything that is going on
Is hard
Worth it (is it?)
        
           Some of it is

Today I have a headache 
I cried for two hours last night 
Until I asked for help
And my eyes hurt 

          An ice pack, painful enough to shock

Today I am fragile
Taping across the hairline cracks
Trying to fill myself back up
Whilst my cracks try to leak 

Shall I sit in this bath

Bubbling over, tears pouring

A trench of pain

I can feel the fertile places inside me

Cracking open

Aeration is good for the soul

And after enough hydration

Maybe some seeds will grow

The best breath of air

Is when you throw your head back

Arch of your back is clearest lungs

Expanding, sternum cracking

My heart open and crying

Ode to the Coffee Things

But its a black and decker coffee maker you see, a really strange thing 
If you are not from here.

I can hear my wife slowly exhaling through pursed lips as I explain this to someone
Yet again. What about the pour over, she suggests, hopeful, as a place where some space might open up in our very small home. 

I will sacrifice the dusty, rubbish, pour over in favour of the two different sized cafetières that are a brutalist steel, instead of the elegant glass, to stop the inevitable accidental shattering in the kitchen sink.

What about the small one, she asks, logical and practical and I grin, as I don’t answer. I dream of a house with beds for other people, children, dogs, all that Stuff. Maybe if i could spread it all out, she won’t mind as much.

She won’t notice the mugs accumulating.

(Hah)

No you can’t get an aero press, lips pressed thin before a loving smile. But do you know it represents a part of what adulthood is supposed to be to me?

My brother, ten years older, sometimes like my dad, sometimes not, loved the coffee Things and my kid-brain latched on to that. 

Let the kettle cool before pouring, stir it. Maybe I’ll let the black and decker go, it really is too big, and the violence of red led offends me at two am but I’ll be letting something of my childhood dreaming go too. 

Wind spills through trees
Leaves whirl 
Caress my skin with it’s cool fingers
Like a lover 
I hear the earth talking to me