On a beach in Italia

A newspaper hangs over the thin green fence that separates their boatshed from us—the bronzed, exposed public. A slim, muscular, latté-skinned man stands facing the sea, the murky green of a tattoo splayed across his right shoulder. It is a pirate girl who stares out menacingly from his taut skin, as if in warning. A grimacing welt, slightly bigger than a golf ball, juts out of his side; he dabs sunscreen on it, pink and grey and dead-looking. My mind burns.

            In my line of sight, there is another dark body with a female inked into its back—her eyes are closed, her red lips pursed and her green hair overflowing with hibiscus flowers. This body puffs at a cigarette, basking in fluoro-green sunglasses and mint-hued Speedos.

            Dewy-eyed men prowl across the pebbles, sarongs and jewellery and toys draped about them like Christmas decorations. Between the hot white shore and the warm, salty sea is a blur of carnival-colour. There is a diverse array of umbrellas: aqua, pink candy-stripe, rainbow, coral, emerald, South of France sailor-stripe, tablecloth orange, Hawaiian floral. And hundreds of towels in blinding shades—a loving contrast to the brown bums that rest upon them.

            And there are boats, sleek James Bond speedboats and grand, tall yachts whose masts soar upwards like giraffe necks or old Parisian lampshades.  There is a sunflower-yellow waterslide running off a boat into the water with kids in clingy bright bathing suits hovering by.           

            Everything is hot, hot, hot and enclosed beneath the proud, distant Ancona mountains. They watch over us like an immovable father while we play and sweat in this rainbow pie with crisp blue crust. Every jigsaw piece of every body has a gleam to it and there is the scent of sunscreen on skin, then the sound of babies crying and children pig-squealing and water lapping, lapping, lapping against the stony, white shore.

            There is no one here who covers up. Liquorice allsorts of bodies are dotted along the beach—saggy bumps of flesh bulge out from black bather-bottoms and tiny, hairy calves trot into the waves, towards the mountains. 

Intern daze

I write small, fanciful articles here and there for Broadsheet Media these days.

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The Cats' Mother

You smell to me like kittens and baby’s milk.

Inside odours are where you hide

and cry over midday movies

that remind you of your childhood

and of your father,

who always eluded you.

You prefer not to drive at night,

your bird-thighs wobble beneath the wheel,

and the TV set flickers as you sleep,

its chatter cradling

your skinny, lonely frame in the dark.

I wonder why you aren’t kept snug by

that heart of yours; it melts marshmallows

and latches softly onto mine,

as your cats paw at your cheeks

to wake you in the rose-lit mornings.

Those sad, doe eyes are frozen over;

ghostly pools, they cannot thaw.

They no longer know or dream of

spring, or summer, or sundrenched chests,

or toasty laughter.

I wish my own love for you could,

like talcum powder on bath-wrinkled toes,

dry up the moisture of your woes.

I wish, while alone in your kitchen,

you could love you

like your cats do.