after Haley Heynderickx’s album I need to start a garden
Side A
Haley says “face me,” and I do. I face you,
and now neither of us is alone. The sky
pours and pours while we’re naked
in your bedroom. I’d call it dewy here,
the soft sheen on your forehead dripping
onto mine. On your windowsill ledge
a centipede and praying mantis and millipede
sway in a line to the grunts travelling
through drywall to glass. Here
is the honey, just at reach. You and your tongue
urge me along, before it’s time
to flip the record. Haley is ready for the silence,
ready for the nothing. And within those few
seconds before the record stops spinning
and the room is so silent that the bugs
are audible in their breathing, your tongue,
and your mouth, and my back, arched
over the sheets.
Side B
You return to the bed, tissues in hand,
my whole body stretched out in a show.
The bugs clear out and you hold me,
my honeycomb holding you. We spin
along with Haley, our gods hanging in the air
between the dresser and floating bookshelf.
We haven’t been outside all day. Everything
is happening in this very room.
Our foreheads and noses and lips all pressed
together at the same time. We want
at each other’s hearts, fruit nectar
and pomegranate, licking and biting, and
there’s no blood but you’re close,
holding off just so. There’s no quick orgasm
on Zoloft. The glow on your scrunched face,
our names, linked, puffed up spectrums
of better light. The song, before it ends,
you finish. And the last chords, gone
along with the good and the bugs
and our gods.
***
Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist originally from Pakistan and now settled in Canada. She works as Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and is Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She is a member of Ottawa-based collaborative writing group VII. Her debut poetry collection is MONUMENT (Brick Books). See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.
***
image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 