BITEZ

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Olive moss clothes a cottage.
Here, I don't squash the moth or swat the wasp.
I grip a paper cloth, a glass cup, pick them up
like a stunning butterfly or summer nasturtium.
Set them free at the window watch as they pursue sunset,
even nettles know my softness. I ask bramble for consent
to be plucked from sweet grass. I giggle at God's imagination
When I spot the rat the size of a gentle man in the garden.
How I too, am only a half idea turned flesh. Afraid
like the ladybird of being crushed under a strange foot -
for my inconvenient beauty.

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4am, Amanda's pimp guts an opp like the soft white underbelly of a pufferfish,
homicide becomes a delicacy, cuisine ticked off her pimp's bucket list.
Rain plays the album called Autumn while Amanda dons a heart-shaped bra

to skydive into magma, the car slows, a window is rolled. The trick's wink
is traded for her smile. Amanda is never at the right address, hostage to Skid Row
experience; despite crisis, Beverley Hills beams behind her eyelids.

Cardiac arrhythmia escorts her into the ambulance's stomach. Time and time again
she thinks quitting would be winning, tossing pennies into sewers.
Circling the same street, the longest sprint. Wearing a different colour wig every
week

to be somebody; Wintour, Winehouse, Whitney. Dreaming
of crack, Colombia-imported until submerged in a bathtub full of serpents.
Tone deaf songbirds wail outside like banshees premeditating white noise.

On the tattered mattress, Amanda rubs his raw salmon, screams in the VR headset.
In the morning the director of the rehab centre asks her to say her name,
trains her for YouTube, to make it fall out like good news.

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Before you swam inside her amniotic sac

your mother witnessed her cousin sink

in the local river – tells you to never wade in water

or else they’ll steal you. Secretly, you know

you are a siren. Men from foreign islands come

to watch your breaststroke on Tuesdays,

swimming class, chlorine competence.

Learning how to resist a current that kills.

Waves of an octave, the C7 hit to perfect pitch.

Blue Ariel, in the style of new jazz &negro spiritual,

songs to make adults dream clear skies again, oceans.

Mother tells you to look both ways when crossing the road,

don’t ride a bicycle and never dive.

Independence is a death sentence, suicide.

You wear blue agate to soothe your throat chakra,

a turquoise painted pool, a portal into bliss.

Students jump into horizons, armed with life jackets,

at home you swipe your Phone, open the chirping app,

wince at AI art, how Ariel is photoshopped blonde

beside Jamaican Sebastian. In the bathtub you ask,

How do I sing with a plagiarised voice?

while someone copyrights your song.

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