Mount St. Cemetery

Gemma Moore

The wind takes up the most space between us now.

If I lie on my back and stick out my tongue,

all you have to give me is one hundred years

and a few more days,

and I’ll grow moss like all the other gravestones that brave the wind.

I’m braving it.

The air looks thick, rosé and grabbable,

floating just out of my swipes.

I glare at the overbearing clouds, repugnant of their dominion.

Moody teenage weather, I cussed it out, but all it could hear was something

like unhee unhay ehuh.

Meditation is preached for a reason, so I took a microdose as I waited for the next century.

Randomly, out of the stink, I found a gritty little bit of wisdom

mistakenly dropped by my regular, who told me to leave school and bet on horses

because horses can’t email you DEATH THREATS.

I keep it on me like a butterfly blade, and get told I

look like I could peel an orange in my pockets.

Taking the high ground, through a scientific guise,

these people look like bog bodies already,

I thought glumly, those poor gaunt and waxy ones, leading each other like camels

grabbed and got and stomped and mashed into the mud

by the evil hooves they think actually exist.

What these blokes don’t know will hurt them,

I brooded uneasily and decided to get on with it.

I resiled my tongue,

which had only managed to grow a speck of lichen

and the faint outline of your name and death

carved into its porous surface.