Florence
a poem I wrote about my best friend (I love you)
I wrote this a couple of years ago, I think, about my best friend Flo. She is one of the best, most magical things in my life, and I am so grateful for her and her endless love and support, especially at the moment when things have been tough. Flo, girl of water and fire smoke, I love you.
There are two women I know forming one soft and silky on the surface dark eyes of endless gaze and milky white teeth the other one, her eyes riptide placated by the ocean’s collision with the shore. Water that holds you and heals you simultaneously pulls you below into tumult holding a violence instead of a living being. Where there is water, I am fire drench me in you; let’s go for a swim in the lake where the water is dark, blue-black, colour of midnight and infinity. A world beneath the surface of the water peel back the skin, laced by moonlight indirectly, the light of the sun two luminaries that make you whole and luminesce fizzle out encompassed by the pull of the tides. A white dress stained with blood of a surgery performed by your hands you grow yourself on petri dish wrap the bloody flesh in red and white ribbon a sacrificial offering red and white and red and white ghoulish as you atrophy and your spirit passes by ritual through ribbon into cells and heartbeat. Fire lit, fire light watches you dance water bubbles up and pale as smoke that dress clings to your form, trying to grasp onto meaning inscribed in sigils on the lake bed pillows of water and weed await — But your dress denies, blood billowing into water, shark attack refrain… Yet you are teeth and flesh, too. Bodies of water pulled by the moon’s tides create order and control in chaos. Your limbs are tugged to and fro and you sink sink like a pebble sink like a stone sink like an anchor leaving your replica to mimic you in perfect harmony until she too is fully grown and dives into the water in your wake.