A Language of Limbs

by Dylin Hardcastle

‘You live in Country, not on it.’

Because my mother, standing in the doorway of the garden shed, screams. Or at least, that’s how I’ll remember it. A scream that pierces and pulls apart. Her words all blurring together, because I am already underwater.

With her, my naked body shifted from an object of desire to the subject of the story.

I’ll never again be between the borders of that house, because my being is transgression.

Because, I realise, hate and love sometimes come wrapped up and intertwined. It’s easier, this way.

In these half-known truths, there are endless endings, and I mourn the open-ended ending of everything I ever knew.

We like to think of full stops and final pages, but so often the book is forgotten or lost, leaving us on a half-formed thought with nothing to close the

I remember how nothing necessarily felt wrong, until it suddenly felt right.

I exist, otherwise.

You just don’t know that the last time is going to be the last time until it already has been.

to have someone in this big wide world know that I loved her. That I loved her. That it was real.

Many historians have attempted to erase us, Geoff says. They’ve never favoured those with our kind of…disposition…but we’ve always been here, in the margins…if you know where to look.

In a world that wishes for our annihilation, here are our bodies, spectacularly colliding.

Poetry / is sometimes a no

Four decades from now, a disease will sweep across the world, and they will call it a global pandemic, and governments will act and mobilise, and borders will close. The world will be locked down and people will speak of this strange and unprecedented time. Again and again, they will say, this strange and unprecedented time. And for those of us who are still alive, we will say, this is not my first pandemic.

There is so much remembering. All the time. Because we are living in the past. Remembering the summers languid and the parties heaving, wishing, always, to return to that beautiful before, the one in which we swam and fucked without fear, the one in which everyone was living and alive.

Her death is like a bird slamming into a window. The sudden shock that the sky has limits. That my motherhood was a trick of light.

Her death is like a bird slamming into a window. The sudden shock that the sky has limits. That our liberation was a trick of light.

I wonder, what is the weight of my grief if it cannot be carried by others? What is the measure?

And all I can feel is a deep resentment for the way the world just gets on, like nothing has happened at all.

Why did I do that? Scared to rejoice? Shame at the thought of others listening? Shame that they’d hear me? Shame at my pleasure? Shame straddling everything I love. Shameful body. Shame! What a shame…

Grief is not sadness. It is a kaleidoscope of desires. Like white light refracted through skin. Sadness, I think, is the object. And grief is the negative space.

I consider that another me might have folded in this moment, might have swallowed his cries and given in, might have held and rocked him and whispered in his ear, I didn’t mean it, I take it back. But swimming has simplified things. Through the repetition of every tumble turn, stroke, kick and breath, all that is excess is chipped away, like rain eroding rock, until the raw truth is the only thing left.

Like this, days pass through me, or I pass through them. Either way, the transition is smooth, because when I swim, it’s just my body and my mind, blurring together, until they’re as inseparable as the night sky and the night sea, and I’m no longer resenting my flesh for what it couldn’t become.