A Language of Limbs

by Dylin Hardcastle

We are the same ocean in different drops.’

And I liked how it felt, being turned inside out, learning that the self becomes whole in the moment it is opened.

a murmuration in the sky – swelling and contracting – the room is dark and blurry at the edges – everything is burning aching deep inside – and it feels good, this ache – a pulsation making me feel that I am alive

The throb of my flesh is an anchor hooked into the dirt of the present. I am held here by this pain, sharp-edged and metallic.

All I want is to be excised of this haunting.

I think a lot about words and how they stretch and collapse. I think of how an entire picture is threaded from single, often disparate, strands.

Because the river of mountain memory is achingly fresh. And my face will be wet with tears, not because I’ve dreamt of her again after all these years, but because in this dream, I am kissing her, and now I’ve woken up.

And it’s not that she looks particularly striking. Yet I am entirely struck by her, like lightning into sand, transforming my body into glass, so that I suddenly become translucent and utterly breakable.

AND I SAW NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH

I learn how pining starts between the thighs and spreads outwards, stomach clenched and fingers feeling like shallow light because all the blood is rushing out of them. And it’s not that I haven’t yearned before. This feeling has been long deep in me, but that now it is swollen with promise and fully realised.

All the ghosts of her make the air of the present thick and hard to swallow.

You’re so strong! Look at how strong you are! What I never imagined is how much I would have liked to have remained soft.

There’s an everything unfolding somewhere / and I want to see that / live out all that unfolding / shiny like sweat on bodies / I want to be there / in that unfolding / in all that unfolding / over and over again

dissolving into my blood like ice into ocean.

loving you was like opening the windows to let the sunshine in. Because, in a world that tells me so often that I should not exist, you made everything worth existing for. Despite all the hardness forced upon us, your love kept me soft. I am beautifully soft, thanks to your tenderness and your care. And I will remain soft, for you, in your absence.

Sadness, I think, is the object. And grief is the negative space.

let the water carry what you can’t.