A Year Spent Grieving
2025
By This Cruel Temple
(Hannah Kate Absalom, Em Doodles, Meej Douglas, Hollie Palmer, & Bodie Stanley)

Dear Phillip,

Eighteen concrete heads smile at me on their way to worship, hurting each other the way the sorry does
and it sounds different / that I’m suffering
Your bile swills the shore clean Foaming my skin I have infected you all. I could not be more sorry if I tried.

Bones scratch the gullet – Topical ointment pierced such a fine painful grin across my lips
A year spent grieving has done me no good festering in an ash-bloated new bellied seed, it lays there redundant swollen, warts and all.

A temple is pink and peeling and what worship will ever replace you But when I unpeel you are happy nesting in my mouth

Needle bone lodged in my gum allowing hot bricks to serrate my cheeks clean caught like mud in his teeth A cavity (inside of something else) for a home boyhood, chemically unrealised too far gone now
The same thing occurred with the intestines A forgotten slump a missed opportunity
Your boot is trying to calm the flesh of our shoreline A collection of ringlets sits in the palm of her hand Dead weights are corpse cold that mighty breath like it doesn’t take much away

Would it have hurt us too?
Half ensnared six weeks ago today I kissed you goodbye snagged in the mustard trees I walked in here holding your hand 31 inches calibrating at slow speed
I dip my fingers in their inverted horns becomes a certain and what a wasteland extends its arms across my fish bones, splinter my bag

You have to gently pull always the flesh from the howl Tooth-filled
We dance Bacchanalian upon Salicylic Acid.