It’s 3 am and the power’s out and I didn’t need to know. 2 Blackfish & Waiting Room by Hope Nakagawa
It’s 3 am and the power’s out and I didn’t need to know.
It’s muggy and damp and post billy -
a sound like a coke can opening, a small flash, the air stained -
he’s lying next to me.
We face each other trying to make the other believe
we’re asleep.
Strangely, we aren’t touching, for the first time we aren’t touching.
I’m trying to blame it on the balmy summer night. We don’t have air
con anymore.
His breathing deepens as if to say
“hey look, it’s done now.”
and my body screams for his attention because there’s noise
betraying that he’s just as awake as me but instead
wait for his body to twitch back into REM
and tie me like a knot to his side
but we’re both thinking the same fucking thing:
“I can’t like anyone when I hate myself this much.”
It’s filled the space between us,
denser than the smoke I could see even in the dark,
We wonder if whatever this is now will still be here when the lights turn back on.
At least, that’s what I’m wondering. He could be asleep.
2 Blackfish
He said, “I can’t relate to art
about getting heartbroken because
I know everything that transpired
was my fault.”
I consider how I break my own
heart loving on men who live
with ghosts over our pints of shitty beer.
From here we can hear the sea.
At home, I’d tell my mother about his
job as a sailor, a coxswain, a skipper.
she might pretend to be impressed
but I know all she
hears is how I’ve tethered myself to a
guy who won’t ever appreciate my love
of being absolutely fucking stationary.
Even still, he smiles at me as if
we’ve known each other for years,
as if there’s a small secret
between us the world won’t care about,
as if I ought to stumble over my own
thoughts thinking of him.
The last thing my ex said to
me was, “burn in hell,” and
that peals with an exact imitation of
his voice here, as I sip. I laugh.
I tell my stories.
He thinks of his ex everyday, and
I’m okay with that,
for now, it fits with my need to self-harm
worse than cutting, these two shitty beers
and an unavailable man.
Burn in hell, we’re making out on the beach now.
Waiting Room
A bee’s wings will beat two hundred and twenty times per second and in the same breath, the earth will travel four hundred and sixty meters on its axis without notice. For a human to move one step forward they must use one hundred and ninety-eight muscles from toe to hip, and in turning a page, forty-eight bones must pivot in their allocated spaces to expose the familiar syntax it eye craves. In the second that a bee beat its wings so did a fertilised germ split sixty-four times to create tissue, that at its evolution, I will terminate.
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Executive Producers
Daniel Henson
Sue White
