HANDS

I ask the man I love to be cruel.  To wring salt from the blue-hot gorges of my whines until I’m
overcome. This neck a door to a past life we close              again and again
with a hiss. His swinging face above mine, rimmed with opaline petals. A sundial glitching the
inhale we live in. And while touching extinction for a sigh, I probe whether he has it in him. This
man whose second language is asking    What do you need, honey?       His room:
quoted mugs, summered bamboo—I find no sharp objects, though my eyes roll back enough to
skate omniscience. What does he know                of a ruptured moment,
the blurriness of its veins?  How quickly the sun blinks away fog to interrogate our faces. The
throat, a corkscrew damming pleasure / crater parroting ache. It’s impossible to feel your color
slip until it boomerangs,        searing someone else’s existence. What does he know of
the wolf who howled over my vodka-logged torso some Novembers ago? How a blink before he
was a hearth de-mythifying wildfires like my father. While the man I love holds my savage
insistence for ransom I hold him      and the wolf               (down)
belly bloating like a fatigued star. When he sleeps—the man I love—his hands are just hands. I
graze them unceremoniously at the park the next day. The way they dangled my breath over the
palm of stillness,               a distant cliffhanger. Orange glaze skims the lake,
rippled softly by pedaling geese. If given the chance to take care of something see how close you
can get to destroying it          then stop—             the way Allah
taught us to.  I know more of this than any satin safeword slicking cheek. I know more of
moments twisting away from you (a stream kissing itself into a bow knot)     than his hands.

Without my enemy who would I be

Against the future, your shadow flickers like a silent film. As if with any paling sweetness, press
the monochrome under your tongue. There goes the trash, dragging father’s black cutout with it.
I sling mother’s sun-pebbled cloud on dreams like the dress of a delinquent bride. Let’s cut the
shit. Old age rainbows over me. To be everybody’s everything, you must carve your desires like
proper state lines. I desire walking through a secondhand store and getting away with breaking
tchotchke. At the farmer’s market, a man skimmed my palm, told me it wasn’t my first bull
ride—this little life of mine echoing like an apology that came too late. O skin, sow and nurture
the daggers I turn on myself. Every apocalypse, petrol-laced salve. Is Allah both an arsonist and
arborist in every reality, or just this one? Because a mirror is another wall you can’t go through.
Rewind the super 8 too many times and it will ignite in the projector. Smoke a town down to a
whisper: What if in this sequel, Icarus decides to flutter towards the moon?

Arumandhira (she/her) is a Blasian queer writer and marketer born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia (now surviving in Los Angeles). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Wax Nine Journal, Bruiser Mag, SWWIM, and Fauxmoir. She makes music under the name Ohyeahsumi.