Sugar is people too
The thief is in my mouth again; he knows how to pick his marks.
As I hear his footsteps on my tongue I become
a hummingbird-heart of hot-fingered delight,
I want him to visit me nights and rob me senseless.
Even when I’m having sex I’m thinking about
white crystals yawning up through my stomach
and into my chest.
The thief has taken up residence in my mouth.
He has an office and a secretary and prints his name
in sickly serifs on slivers of my teeth. My teeth are the skeletons
of a herd of elephants as small as marbles
I declare total love on the refined atom thud
of warmth at the bottom of my throat
with its five-finger You know I’d never leave you,
and I become a puddle of indulgence
and impatience
and incapability
and sweet emptiness.
I am the monster under my own bed.
(previously unpublished)
Adham Smart is a writer and translator from London. He was a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2006, 2008, and 2009, and has had writing in The Cadaverine Anthology (Cadaverine Magazine, 2009), Korsakoff’s Paper Chain (Sidekick Books, 2010) and The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011). He studied Linguistics and Georgian at SOAS, University of London, and is now doing a masters in Linguistics at Oxford. Twitter: @AdhamSmart92
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