Love Sequence Edits
Taking the poem Tragedy, I have edited the individual stanzas into four of their own poems, which would slot in regularly to a sequence about a collapsing relationship.
1. [Exeunt] it ends like this: our bloody hands. fingers dug so deep into skin our arms will bear crescent tattoos forever.
palms wrapped so tightly around hearts, held so close they have purpled and begun to die,
never beat quite beat right again.
5. [Interval] a body lies in the bathtub. i stand at the mirror watching droplets fall: mascara, water, dirt, blood, an image painted in so many shades i cannot remember which strokes are yours. i cannot remember
the canvas beneath, only the brush against my jaw, the cup of tea you mistook for an ink pot and i continued to drink from anyway, for fear it was the closest i would ever get to you inside me.
8. [Scene One] a warm cup shared between freezing fingers, hidden at the back of a coffee shop, the fear of being seen a spectre between our lips. if the world collapsed, as it has been trying to our whole lives, we would not mourn. we thought we had read infinity in our tea leaves, as if we could know the whole painting from a single stroke, the end of the play before the curtain ever rose.
10. the certainty of missing scenes our first kiss in the dark of the theatre, behind the wings. our first fight, nails drawing blood in the rain. all the paintings held only in your eyes that you never told me but should have.
my wrists turned to the moon, leaking into the bathtub. your head beneath water. who died first? whose hands were stained, whose touch turned cold? if we staged our scripts side by side, would they be the same play?
