notdeermag
Bathtime, Sophia Holme
Seven thirty submerge
Sipping whiskey with honey with
lemon juice stinging the ripping on my
cuticles pumice stone nipping at my heels'
dead layers - don't go too far now. Pulling
an old razor back like a curtain, revealing
a smooth skin sky, a constellation of roots and
the water mucked: hair-grainy, shave-scummy
to the tune of some somber song, voice muffled, phone face-down on a towel.
My chest is singed, I'm swigging, and I remember I'm soft inside,
deeply soft, bruised always, my mind is like silken tofu,
but I smooth a mask over my face anyways, and it hardens to porcelain.
Eight pm and the spendy face wash,
in all it's milky slippiness, rubbed in careful little coin-motions
but these careful gestures are feeling stupid,
so I abandon my decolletage to dry chalky, my ankles bleeding diffusely,
and a row of red dots running at the bend of my knee.
Pull myself up to confront the rich and woozy air.
Shampoo squirted on a dry scalp, a cursory scrub through
While suds slide and huddle on my legs
Shifting the handle and the static hiss of the shower - the shower's gone cold,
And the cold slugs me, I'm shivering hard as the water itself,
it's calcium coated showerhead whispering vicious nothings
into my neck. So I pop out goosebumped
as a slaughtered hen, hairdrops raining on the floor.
Eight thirty emerge, swiping at the fogged mirror searching among
the light and the steam, I'm in there somewhere, wrung out
and slick, sated and clean.
Sophia Holme is a poet, writer and bookseller made in Canada but now based in Oxford, England. In her spare time, she enjoys running, adsorbing as much queer literature as possible and drinking a lot of coffee. Tweet at her here @Holmesophia