EVE HUGHES
Cosmic microwave background
All you are is bright, streaming girl,
sun-seams You fall
to the floor and I receive you
— I have seen you bare
as a new star, shy, incendiary
The pulse almost too loud to bear
— Let me emerge from you
hair-ends wet, hands at my head,
in a fever eyes, mouth upturned
to the light —
hound
What will become of the way my feet fall through the path
to my parents’ bathroom, fingers brushing their bedlinen and
eyes working at nothing — or more accurately nothing worth
noticing, only the late sun, the plane of cloud, the gathering end?
There’s a figure in my head. A project, too, and a place for it to live.
I admit this — I feel for the form of my dog in the dark, a slender
tidal erosion, slate blue. When I leave I turn on the light for just
a second, only to be sure I didn’t toe too close. Her bed is empty.
She sleeps, sparking bright, in the glow of the TV down the hall.
pure
For days I bled
like a dog. God’s days.
You, woman, my drop
on white cloth, my
unclean, exquisite love-pain.
I had to look away.
— Unsex me now, make thick
this night between us,
hole-dark, ringing down.
The backs of my hands are dry.
I let it drip down my jaw
when I drink. It gets hard
to hold.
Eve Hughes is a poet from Ōtautahi Christchurch, currently in Year 13 at Cashmere High School. Her interests include philosophy, art history, religion, and lesbian studies.