by Dorian Winter
my wrinkled hands are far too shaky to suture
this gaping undercurrent between the two of us
neither of us constructed the ruby-red-bridge
neither of us are looking out to monet’s garden
not in this weather, anyway
how, how do i bring you closer?
how do i stop the world - just for a minute or two,
halt the tsunamis, the scratch of saltwater through our nasal cavities,
how do i allow us to swim, how can i make us live forever
like languid coral on the divan-shaped sand.
you tell me, excited, “i can see the night sky from here”
and i smile, floundering around,
i don’t tell you that i rallied up all the starfish
called the anglerfish to suppress their terror
and light up the bottom of the ocean for the two of us.
Dorian Winter is a modern-day dandy, psychology student and artist harking from Boorloo, Western Australia. He is interested in the visceral, the archetypal and unconscious, often forming marriages between the literary canon and dusty copies of the DSM-5. He has been published in Pelican Magazine and is the editor-in-chief of emerging international literary journal ‘Antler Velvet’.