Lads

With them, sex feels like miming drowning;
with gapped mouths gasping, their rower’s arms
too heavy from the drink to pull them back
to shore, the thrashing, the feeling
of being below the surface, the grabbing.

& waking next to them in morning,
the bed having spat back their sleeping bodies
to the sun, having fished them into sobriety
like a plastic bag wrenched from a river,
when they are on their backs and gorgeous
like funeral home corpses —
this is when they are most beautiful —

before they wake into themselves:
become one in a thousand boys
named Ollie, repeating tales
about the time they spent in Radley,
lifting their glasses to the rugby
on the telly, left to rehearse
their deaths-by-water nightly,
with a girl they will call Easy.

Woman, 30, Seeks Orlando Bloom

Orlando Bloom, come quick. I want your world:
it fits me so much better than my own.
My husband tells me I’m a wreck because
most days I let the children make a mess
and cannot leave my bed; I pull my hair
out from the stress, but I firmly believe
that if we married I would be stable
enough to have six kids and still be thin.
Orlando — please teach me which kissing angles
are best for photos. Let's tell magazines
our kids are little angels. Come quick—
I’m dangling on the threads of want.

And when we end (I’m not delusional,
we will) you’d end it well: all Hollywood
and acted out —“Darling, we're through. We're through!
Hey babe: a pleasure doing business with you.”

Orlando, I just know your world is better
than my own: where my husband leaves barcodes
in the dinner’s aubergines and I’m left to
peel the stickers off with my front teeth.
And on those nights, I think not of him but
of the grocery boy, who must still be
in high school, strapped for cash, still hopeful,
and I think of his hands touching my own
instead of my poor husband’s. I think of how
the grocery boy must've cradled our vegetables
like the small breasts of his backseat girlfriend,
a Latina girl, I think, whose build is sweet
and parents speak in broken English.

Orlando, you must know what nights like these
are like: I won't bring up the scandal, your ex-wife,
but Bloom, you must admit: we fit.
Orlando Bloom, come quick.

Love Poem

It’s simple. We could live like characters
in a children’s book, in a house you built.

Some nights we’ll sleep on different sides
of the bed than usual, and wake up

feeling irrevocably changed from the switch,
then bake pancakes and spend the day inside.

This life is what I think of most when Mother
holds me at tongue-point and begs me

to explain what Heaven is to her.
She is ageing and wants a poet’s perspective

on the matter: Mother, I think Heaven is
with him, baking pancakes, and I’m not saying

this is a Love Poem what I’m saying is
this is what I think of when I think

of my life after-death. I am not saying
this is a Love Poem, I am just saying

that if God flung me and him into the water,
that, by Hell, I’d find a way to float.

I’d gather wood, debris, from the house
he built, our house happy and pure

enough for children’s books, and find a way.
Mother, I’m thinking this is why

Heaven is for those who do not sin:
so children, still sinless things, can read

about the place. Mother, I am thinking
Heaven must be a love poem—

I do not think this is a love poem.

Sarah Fletcher is a British-American poet living in London. In 2012 and 2013 she won the Christopher Tower Poetry Prize. Since then, she has been published in The London Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, Word Riot, and in anthologies with The Emma Press and Eyewear Publishing. She is most recently looking forward to the publication of her pamphlet Kissing Angles with Dead Ink in March 2014.

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