Digital Poetics 3.22 Mesh by Alex Aspden

alighting on skin as pure irradiance, even in darkness penetrated only by low yield moon/street light through porous curtains. drop anywhere in this bed and you will find love. the cushion of pillows and mattress replicated in warm air pushed against skin, encased in soft before falling into each other with hands ranging over necks/stomachs

a glass of water in a turquoise cup resting on a copy of anna kavan knocked with foot from the stool that acts as a bedside table. ignored but with the knowledge that the water was only a third drunk to prevent a nighttime piss (suffering/tiny bladder) and has likely soaked a copy of celan’s sprachgitter (they have healed me to pieces) lying open on the floor. the rest will slip between the floorboards that crack in the heat in this high summer to be absorbed into the floor or drip individually into the flat below, disturbing other scenes of nocturnal love or elevated reflections on the trivialities of the day that if we did not elevate we would have nothing 

(these things grow roots in you that may never sprout. they will die or instead grow thick and taut)

then wrapped in crisp bedsheets despite the fanless heat (rotor hanging by wires out the back). a strange modesty comes over me but she’s unaffected, padding to the bookshelves or kitchen to return with book or banana. showers are taken or sweat is worn like a gown all night to soak into the sheets

affirmation when lip on lip or lip on shoulder or neck in metro stations or bars or in the street where two cats cross our path to tear apart a rubbish bag then each other. some days few words pass between us but others many thousands hers always smothering mine (the mouth sewn shut in a family of silence and misgiving)

or sitting alone in the metro at night coming home from a film she didn’t want to see (60s/french/fuck no her words) with beers in me, resisting straying too far or at all into prudent thoughts about our future. attempts to dissuade myself from that want or imagined want before returning to the flat with rain falling on corrugated something somewhere, unextracted prudence still in the mind regarding us and my situation in this country. at the bottom of the wardrobe is my passport that i want to destroy not to bathe in the romance of exile but to kill memory and allegiance. my residential status requires me to report with the passport to the police station at monthly intervals. the new state insists on allegiance to the old as i stand before its foot soldiers or at least the one confined to the front desk with passport in hand lined up with venezuelans and romanians and others. the estado novo did not die but instead became all states in its opposition to all that was not desired by the state

love once again when she abandons the desk leaving open her laptop screen showing images of public housing in the baltic states that catch my eye at moments of respite or transfer to new positions. the granite facades on the screen fade with the rest of the room as the act bleaches everything, shrouding it with white canvas as we become each other in acts of faith, moss growing on opposite sides of a rock in a forest that will one day meet and conjoin and spread smothering all life animal and plant under its dozing green fuzz

afterwards sitting on the bed drinking beer/eating bananas ironically (i’m sorry) reenacting scenes from films in which bodily scars are displayed and exaggeratedly bragged about. mine zero except where a lid from a tin of beans sliced my index finger and she only where minor exploratory surgery was undertaken for a tumour that wasn’t there. she wins and she wins at the bananas finishing a fourth while i lie flagging after three. i’ve bailed and so has my mind, lying back now and allowing what if and what’s not and all introspection to quietly subside, instead tacitly and slowly straying into what can only be called light beyond light

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Alex Aspden is a writer based in London. He was shortlisted for The White Review Short Story Prize and longlisted for the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize in 2022. His first chapbook, four walls, four towers, was published by Bottlecap Press in the same year.

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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.