Did you mean what you said the night of the flood,
my darling royal of my heart?
You and I have a past:
it trickles,
it lingers.
We became one another
in that sticky centre of the self where reality is absent—
perhaps we grew stuck,
like trees sucking life from one another.
You know the kind;
we read it in a book once,
with our joint eyes
and our muddled minds.
I’d like to point out the poetry we wrote
was all mine.
And still, like a parasitic vine creeping through my brain, IrememberIrememberIremember, again,
when everything was new:
you ate me up like sandpaper—chewed—and spat back out the rough edges. So I grew to love you,
to crave the intimacy of your crooked laugh,
your old throat,
your living breath,
your humble rasp,
your stifled neck—bent—forever looking up.
And I rewrote my life from the way it reflected
in your wild eyes,
gathered around the inferno of fireflies, sipping on time like it meant nothing to us.
We sat still for so long that the years passed like days,
and we called ourselves godlike.
What an awful display of narcissistic tendencies. If greed is the sin, then lust was the game, and
somehow we grew—intwined and rotten—like inosculated trees. Divine decay, my lovely girl,
my lovely grave.
– Noah Cottle
“Inosculation” won third place in the debut competition from Where Ideas Grow Blog. The competition was themed “Growth”.