Naoise Gale is a poet from Yorkshire. She was first-prize winner of the Ledbury Poetry Competition 2022. Her debut pamphlet After the Flood Comes the Apologies was published by Nine Pens and shortlisted in the Poetry Book Awards. Naoise is currently studying an MA at the University of East Anglia.
I Want It All
The city-centre flat and the ivy-wrecked terrace by the station,
the bohemian carpets and fairy lights streaming down staircases
like fungus. I want the whisper of steam from a mug and the sudden
sweet of candy cane, gritty, filmic afternoon. I want slow dancing
outside the chip shop, our tongues mosaiced with food dyes, and I
want to hold your hand so hard, to highlight your importance. I want
a bookshelf (wood, any variety) and so many paperbacks you could
line them on top of me to form a weighted blanket. I want a job,
a mortgage, bank bills less ghoulish; I want Halloween with orange
plastic smiles and the sultry wrench of slotted spoon pulling at flesh.
I want you to whistle my name down an alleyway and return to me.
I want pesto pasta reheated in the microwave, the privilege
of boredom, of becoming people we’d envy and abhor. I want
that night I picked berries from shoots and swallowed fast without
thinking, that night music came over us like violence and I saw
the stars sprinkled over the sky tiny as raisins. I want a cartoon man
with an origami face, perhaps dark hair, curly eyes – I want
a baby I can croon to and a family I can hold when it’s raining.
Sometimes I want smoky jazz New Orleans morphine
my vulnerability as purple velvet figure-hugger, sometimes I want
a flower-crown of melt a slowness that just sings and sings;
sometimes I want money, safety, regular-sized hardship, but mostly,
this year, I want you to crawl into this warmth with me; I’d allow
the quiet to rest with you, I’d give up all my faces for you.