emi drunk on a Sunday – the kind we did
when we were seventeen as we stumbled into uni
and each other’s lives.
Anyway, I just got home
from feeling fifteen again – head out the window
of my friend’s car, all the air rushing through
my hair. Everything rushing. From the wine and the wind.
Remembering on hyperlapse, what fifteen felt like
but perhaps only the best bits-
Driving in cars with friends before they grew up,
fell in love, moved away. We’re at the traffic lights
by the supermarket now – the one built while we
were still buying scrumpy at the dairy down the road
when we lived on this street. The one we bought our
dinner from. Five dollars and under only on our way to
a party, the plastic bags rattling underneath as we passed
through pedestrian lights.
We wait from red to green, idling with songs we used to
sing when Sundays didn’t matter so much.
Pomegranate seeds in my teeth and on my tongue,
tumeric all orange in the grooves of my fingertips.
We dance in Jaz’s kitchen as the chicken cooks,
above the zoo in Melrose. She puts on outfits
from the second hand store she works at and we laugh,
the gallery of their house wrapping round us as we move.
I haven’t moved like this in ages. People only want to club now,
I say. Everyone agrees. We laugh some more.
Recently I went to a bar with my friends and her journalist posse,
lost them, looked up and she was gyrating on stage
with the Samoan bouncer. I’m all for experiences
but I’d never felt so out of place in my life. I tell this
to Toby and Jaz and they laugh, hunching over the bench, shaking in smiles.
What is all of this and anything anyway! Society. We laugh some more but
the lions interrupt the philosophy of the evening – their mouths open wide,
we can hear them from inside
and for a while everything is silent – even the music
we’d been jiving to seemed to pause as the rush
of naivety of what was once before
came to a gentle halt as we realised we were no longer there anymore.
The car is pulling away from my driveway now – the
evening’s over with the amber tail lights in the night.
Inside, the door clicks shut and I find some paper
by my bed and write in winey hand
‘message anyone you’ve ever loved’
in effort to try and make the most of the moment before it was gone for good.