STRIPTEASE OF A DYING STAR

It’s a fantasy of mine: the great snog of the knife-light.
Scabbard-end. Pearl juice. And to cut my lip.
Climax a drop of blood.
Voyage dans la Lune. A Trip to the Moon- myself a stockinged Méliès bride-
and a long sleep amongst your devotees:
buttered verse, songs, portraits of a night hickeyed with titanium.

The muse unzips herself for you and there- a likeness. A snowy breast.
I cannot summon this fizz core into curves, or into an immortal whore
plucked from the brothel and stroked into godhood.
I have no maidenhead.
When I unzip myself, like a mandarin undressed,
I am a pool / undone opal / milk-stain on a tapestry.

I cannot touch you, nymph of edges and tide spells,
but cup you from afar, as the evening holds lovers.
Without my stockings I diffuse like a sonnet of the mind-
less real than dreams, unwritten, but still a pink vibration,
a glutton for beauty haemorrhaging years (flaky things),
barely existing and plugged only by the doughy form of space.

And I call him, of course, by your name.

Moon, luna, tsuki, selene.

Names. Those strange boils that pop into lyre sounds from things
with mouths and eyes. Like those clay-souled ants down there.

I hate them.
They walk all over you, make it rough, film you blushing in a sex tape.

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Freyja Harrison-Wood, 20, Blackpool - UK ✯

“Freyja Harrison-Wood is a previous Foyle Young Poet, and her work has appeared in the Oxford Review of Books and the Isis Magazine. She is currently reading Classical Archaeology at Oxford University.”