Got sick, you were there
Took a walk with you today and thought about it.
Had espresso at the Italian deli
and looked at preserves we couldn’t afford:
pickled aubergine, imported olive oil.
Still with cotton sellotaped to my inner arm
and underneath, the flowering stain.
Do you remember the night when you told me
that you’d give me your kidney in a heartbeat?
Because I think about it, and I think about
all the heartbeats since then, all the things
we stuffed them with: silver moon on late drives,
silt on our teeth after wine. The bay we overlooked
that September, how in darkness the ocean
transformed into a black and boundless roar
but I wasn’t scared. We were on the roof.
My head on your chest, listening.
At the deli and down the snicket where green ivy
cloaks the barbed wire, I thought about my arm.
Numb from the puncture, until you held my hand.
And I thought about heartbeats, how senseless it is
to count what cannot be counted. What is in abundance,
spilling out, even, from every streetlight and glass bottle
and wild lurch of water and above all in the way it feels
to surrender: my breath to the cove of your throat,
my fear to the certainty of you
Claudia Downs is a writer living in Sheffield, UK. Her work has appeared in Litro, Popshot, and Oh Magazine, amongst others. In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Mslexia Short Story Competition. She is currently working on her first novel.