Adam, One Afternoon
sits in his armchair scrolling through profiles of girls
who hold books like the severed heads of their enemies.
He wishes he could experience the transition to evening
less like a hungry moth flapping its dust towards the magnetic
pools of light, more like a rare edition in the hands of tiny
librarians (wet undies, pressed flowers) never skipping
the boring bits, sadness on their tongues like sugar cubes
dissolve in the dark. When he taps a heart, a door closes softly
and for Adam that’s a thought gone before it even dawned –
pineapple on pizza, every tenth order a chef mysteriously
disappears, every pineapple ring a tiny guillotine, a glitch
in the taste’s algorithm, the tropical middle finger Adam
wants to receive once the crime has been solved
and the pieces of the puzzle put together are the spitting
image of his afternoon seen from above, from the vantage
point of the ceiling – as ceilings are the final surface for beings
with nowhere left to rise – a white anemone, its dark stem
ridged with the fingerprints of those who touched it unknowingly,
its ruby core cooled before it could even catch fire.
IULIA DAVID is a Romanian-born London-based poet whose first pamphlet, Blueprint, was published in 2022 by Green Bottle Press. She is currently working on her first collection.