it’s figs you can taste on his lips when you cover his ears with your hands and become the sell out of the century. just you and him awake now. so you step over peter in the foetal position, john sleeping with his arm thrown across his eyes, and for every breath you’ve despised mary, it’s you turning tricks at this hour with crumpled bank notes stuffed in your back pocket, hot enough to brand the skin through denim. (and later you’ll ask yourself what he asked, did it have to be a kiss? the answer, no. they’d have paid so much more for greater sins).
so you thread yourself through the chaos of fistfights and handcuffs with a mouthful of stolen holiness that stains a purple line on your teeth you brush away in the morning staring into your own unforgiving eyes. already the money is worth less and the skin is peeling away faster than chapstick can fix. and then the headlines watch jesus christ and judas iscariot lock lips, you hardly recognise your features, distant, grainy, indistinct beside an old mugshot, hair full of glitter, face black and blue.
but there it is, the document of the deed, comments underneath do you think he’s fucked them all? (and you breathe coffee and aspirin straight into your lungs, hack it up over the keyboard. the answer, no. not you, never you. isn’t that what this is all about? out on the lake with peter, beloved fucking john, mary’s hands kneading his bare feet). we’ll see soon enough. there he is, like you wanted, god on trial: solicitation. incitement. evasion. possession. resistance. at the mercy of the state. your tears are hot on your face like molten silver
and it is heavy on your tongue, tastes like blood. (they asked you for the price of a kiss. you didn’t know it).
—
Amy Kinsman is a poet and playwright from Manchester, England. As well as being the founding editor of Riggwelter Press, they are associate editor with Three Drops From A Cauldron. Their work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Clear Poetry, Prole, Rust + Moth, Valley Press and Up The Staircase Quarterly.
Photo by: Ana Prundaru