Spitting Geese

So, I’m making out with my cousin Jimmy and we’re practising desire
like in the movies. And I’m laughing when he wants my tongue to roam inside
his mouth. I’d sooner scrub the geese shit from the path.
No, I’d sooner think beautiful thoughts
like how geese fly through the evening, like wounded scarves,
like how they carry pools of water in their bills. C’mon, he urges. Jesus. It makes me spit…

spit a gobful right down Jimmy’s throat. Now a part of me roams forever in his blood.
Double cousins, I tell him. Hoping to make it right. But it’s like saying dusk instead
of evening, it’s like saying desire instead of lust. Like using the beautiful words
to cover up the stink… sweat starting to pool under my arms
and I can’t French kiss. And I think Jimmy is about to sob. He’s got his head in his hands
like a husband. And we sit, Jimmy and me and the geese honking in the scrub.

Scrub, I might say that we’d flattened over the years, made rooms in the bracken—
bedroom, kitchen, hallway lined with white shells and whelks from Farewell Spit
when we were both into nature; on our hands and knees poking at pools
for starfish… making them roam
from water to surrender themselves on the sand and this was before I’d heard the word desire
and well before the kissing that came down on us those hot November evenings.

Evenings. No wonder I say dusk.
Like dusk is from a storybook, like soap and scrub and shiny teeth. And Jimmy
is not my cousin. And like when we jump on each other’s goosey backs and clash
our bills, you can’t call that desire. It’s kinda funny
the way I lay my ear to his warm chest. Listen to the plumbing in his heart. And hey, Jimmy,
my spit is roaming through your veins. It’s whipping up a frothy pool of girl.

Pools of questions. Why we take starfish out of water, why evening always
follows day. Why my tongue begins to roam inside his mouth. And why we scrub
out this remembered thought and not another.
‘Spit on your hands, cross your heart and hope to die if you tell.’
I’ve had enough, says Jimmy. The wind picks up. Colder now. Leaves are
escaping the trees. Cicadas climb out of skins, fat with a new kind of desire.

Desire is what got us here. Our fathers in old-fashioned bathing trunks
eyeing our mothers stepping from the sea in their polka dot bikinis…
All those picnics with tartan blankets and egg sandwiches on Farewell Spit,
the geese flying home to breed.
The long drive home, Jimmy’s head on mine as day turned to evening,
as geese flew in formation through the dark. Roamed high over us.

Mountain and scrub.
I’ve had enough, said Jimmy.
It was dusk, not evening.

Frankie McMillan’s poetry appears in Ōrongohau/Best New Zealand Poems 2012, 2015, and 2022; Landfall, Takahe; and in international journals including Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, and Atlanta Review. Her most recent hybrid collection of short forms Eddie Sparkle’s Bridal Taxi (Canterbury University Press) was published in October, 2025.