Poetry by SK Grout

                             Alexandru Paraschiv CC



about to be split, by the storm’s power, for two different routes

we are in a hire car driving between states of being. we call these cities, when we must, sprawling like maps
we’ve never crossed. next year, we’ll see photographs that spill over the edge and hold our
dreams tight, inadequate with words

the muteness of the road ahead is all we have 
to navigate, the future 
perceptive like a knife. but we are not told 
if the knife is blunt or the knife’s actions or its state of arousal

option 1: there is an emptiness in speed

option 2: it’s this moment that lacks

between us the colour of memory - heavy, a bulb of guava rolling red 
between fingers and tufted at the end, 
the flesh is white and sweet, 
bursts between teeth, unexpected by the hard exterior, but, later, good for jam

toward tomorrow’s dawn the only thing we’ll wear in bed will be the contrast of each other’s sweat-
impressions. I will know you cheat by the taste of spicy butter cookie in your mouth

this argument will last beyond the times of telling

harried, I’ll write into my notebook 
discarded items from a fairy tale –              a mop                  a crown                 a sword                  a glass case     
               a rolled up piece of paper                 a decipher         a field of wildflowers balancing, then 
tipped between the winds of the west, the winds of the east      a market                 a beating heart         
               the price of perception

what am I to know of my neighbours’ galaxies? they are infinite and untold.

I am a branch in a tree, that’s shaking





Untitled [Lovers’ Contract]

it’s late, nearly too late / we sit in your jeep, imprinting / swap curse words as endearments / pumice
each other’s skin / feast with kiss-sharpened teeth / save the hurt for later, I / look for the open field,
you / drain the bottle empty / the sky lights furious and full / and if you want it, do I want it / when
our bodies speak love, it’s attack / without belay / necessity burns me / free-ly / splinters skin / and if I
like it, do you like it / time boltholes us between curfews / precious / like your drenched fingers
swallowed inside me, then prickling towards static air / can you lick it / believe in levered progress,
you / slam your foot three times before it bursts, I/ think blotched swarms of / weren’t we just those
people / loving: with the sureness of a punch drawing blood to the surface of the skin, alive.




​
the presence of absence

storms backlogged into belief, fragile rain falling, 
then tasked with the impossible, harder and harder 
and immeasurably harder, a nostalgia that does not cry, 

but sings / like a gunshot, like a diss rap, humanity 
enters nature with the need to catalogue every second / 
humanity is me, these are the words on the page, 

cards of scratching marks, layers, lines, oblongs, 
like brocade, like perfume, like nougat, memory intense, 
sex possibly, or possibly not, some things evade description / 

like the tree that split in half on the morning of my father’s funeral 
having stood unremarkable for forty years, or on the evening 
of my mother’s birthday, my lost cousin was found, 

body cherished but never the same being / all
these fragments of my family, not quite held together, 
but heavy enough to fall under gravity nevertheless

​

SK Grout (she/they) grew up in Aotearoa/New Zealand, has lived in Germany and now splits her time as best she can between London and Auckland. She is the author of the micro chapbook “to be female is to be interrogated” (2018, the poetry annals). She holds a post-graduate degree in creative writing from City, University of London and is a Feedback Editor for Tinderbox Poetry. Her work also appears in Cordite Poetry Review, trampset, Banshee Lit, Parentheses Journal, Barren Magazine and elsewhere. More information here: https://skgroutpoetry.wixsite.com/poetry

---