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Sestina For Someone You Love

Poem by Millie Baldwin (she/her)

Sestina For Someone You Love

Photo: Caleb Minear / Unsplash

In the next years I don’t want anything
but you sipping through the glass straw in your
jam jar concoction, sitting on the short cut
grass beneath our bums, sun dripping onto skin,
touching elbows, talking turtles and growing
backbones, my sneezes interrupting your lips.

In the next years I only want your lips
and bad weather blocked by windows, nothing
but back to bed by 2pm where we enact growing
babies our bodies can’t have. I like your
knees because they aren’t mine, body so full of skin
they told us should feel like orange peel (cut

and paste.) In the next years I only want home haircuts,
piles of mismatched dishes, creases in our t-shirts, lips
so busy with vaseline and promises - me and my skin
will stay here until you get bored of us or until everything
ends. You are hungry so you bite my ear, metal on your
mushroom tongue. Today we’ve decided to stop growing.

In the next years I only want to start growing
a garden - we’ll have basil, bay, beans, carrots, chilis cut
fresh for the kitchen table, littered with mugs and your
jigsaw, we have half finished cigarettes on lips,
I do not ask you to die with me but you do, everything
is medicine when we’re young, there’s time to fix skin

and lungs. In the next years I only want skin
on chips, a dog and odd socks - does this mean I’m growing
older? I’ve told you I’d let you do anything
you want to me - tattoo as colouring book, cut
nails dug deep in hips, teeth caught in cracked lips.
Future me will go as far as to replace her lungs with yours.

In the next years I only want to be yours.
I have cursed you with knowing all of me - imagine onion skin,
imagine ball of wool, imagine jellyfish sting, imagine unopened lips,
imagine whisking water, imagine forever growing
into a new creature who will tell you all the things
unheard. In the next years it’ll only be you until the film is cut.

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