inertia




louise carter



The artful way in which his thick dirty fingers moved,
tucking the tobacco in, a mechanised procedure
as practised as the recitation of the Rosary –
(a ritual with which he is not unfamiliar).

They sit stiffly on sweat-smeared vinyl seats,
squinting through the dirt-streaked windshield
at gum trees with their leaves hanging limp,
and schoolboys kicking a dust-covered football

elsewhere in the middle distance. She breathes in
a distillery of milk-stained t-shirts, nicotine teeth
and the smell of his bloodshot bull-like masculinity
as the silence shrinks tightly around them, clinging

like a plastic bag. "Just like a cigarette," he says,
handing her the joint. "You have smoked before, right?"
Her choked cough answers the question as he tries
not to smile at this pale creature, her soft features

contorted in a grimace. Convinced it's not working,
she breathes again – deeper, til her thoughts fold
origami inwards, vision chopped into film stills.
Dry mouth, defiled lungs, prickling underarms,

and the lust-lust of a breathing life-force
spreading outwards like blood in water,
iron-salt on the tongue, hungry, starving.
Her voice, a sudden puncture: 'I can't' –

iron bars obscuring the peep show.
His retreat is (near) immediate –
she blames the weed for the three second
lag in which his hand retained its grip

on her leg, trembling on the periphery
of evil – her body as bait, returning now
to an inert state, birds backlit against
an empty sky in the afternoon that didn't
                                         change anything.




shapes


when we were testing the thickness of
the ideas we were fermenting, they grew
large and untidy and we trimmed them
down and moulded them into shapes
we could both appreciate. those days
moved slowly as if we had control, as if
the fastness of life could be slowed by
our inventions, by our superfluous
affections, by a language we both knew.

there we found a pocket to reside in, a
sounding-board for white noise, which
was the sound of thinking. and at the
edge of each other, a periphery of space
that was differently coloured, a texture
that was lathered and wet, mixed and
heated like cooking, a process for which
our minds were required and reduced
over a slow heat, sacrificed to the brew.

we pursued a thing like a movement, we
followed it around corners, seeking to find
that which most closely resembled faith.
a lingering sentience that existed only in
the transitory, fragments that defied our
longing for permanence, imbued the hours
with a wavering peace. losing reason, finding
grace. and discovering that beauty was only
a diversion, a by-product of what was true.

more by louise carter

succubus

adventures in pain

digitalis