street poppies

my feet can’t reach
the ground and
you have me
clinging
to a streetlamp,
a pipeline to pale mandarins.
the pithy gods alight
under these floodlights that
sense water in the drought.
they butt heads like
nicotine through your shirt
and mar this myopia;
a kiss.

the bones are there but
syntax is fading
into motored translations
and little coffees that
have us cresting
these tight lipped bodies,
they’re incoherent as
a moonless sky and
the silence between two palms.
we’re spun adrift, this
romance de la luna
and blank vibrations rouse
the west bank of the Guadalquivir
where the night’s dactylic
and grit is gold.

sepia dreams and honey hues,
they steam from these
pre-socratic tendencies.
i lick the salt from
your fingers,
wrap you
like a bike lock.
there’s a marshmallow
in my martini.
these words you swirl
en ingles.
a single orange drops,
we make marmalade.

the golden hour rusts
this alloyed moment,
skittering sundials,
a circadian reel
to rushlight robberies.
they smoke us out
with thirty five millimetre film
and doe eyes.
while holy headlights
blind these wraiths,
we catch a cancelled train.

Maedbh Pierce is an English and Philosophy student at University College Dublin. She is liable to develop emotional attachment to borrowed books and revert to quotations in times of (primarily existential) crisis. Maedbh has been published in UCD’s Caveat Lector and is working towards a collection of travel poems.