(and so slowly you unwind me ’til I fall apart)

by Ankh Spice

It’s decades since. We’d absconded from the ward,
two not-deads gone wanderwild. Some nights you hear
the unspool, the moment the hand lets go
of the ribbon. How each throw scribbles the map.
This spill seems a new roadway, an unjammed strip.
We drive moebius, then the wind snarls up
any forward in hedgerow, thorn. Rest highway, rest river,
gleaming brown with tarry light: we write music here
so briefly, ask those shining things to remember it
whenever we fear the erase. All we long-
haired boys, said that other kid travelling through
his cutting web of unwound, slow-leaking song. Story
in the corridor goes he made it to the silence and back
bewildered and bleeding and everyone just asked him
about angels. About light. I said we were music, I said
all along, we tried tuning to that original chord.
If we were patient, we’d sit and splice what we find caught
on the margins – stop pretending we have the same setlist
from the start, get everyone playing like we mean it
to last: come obsolescence, come the Next Big Thing,
come this unplanned encore. But we’re not.
One end’s a hard case, endless flip-and-repeat, stuck
to the wheel. The other’s some flickering score
of loose ends—unread fate-lines in the palm
of a roadside wind. Hey, before you let go—
it’s true. There’s always a hidden track.

Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa, author of The Water Engine (Femme Salvé Books, 2021). His poetry is mostly about the brief weirdness of being a person – but then, isn’t all of it? Ankh has co-edited at Ice Floe Press, been a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine, a guest editor for Black Bough Poetry, and is currently part of the amazing team at Sidhe Press. He shares poems, oddness and sneaky sideways glimpses of his brain vs. the world on Bluesky. Ankh is also on Facebook and has a website.