Found a nettle growing under a bridge. Start of summer, I was out looking for shards of your heart between the cobblestones.
A single nettle. Out of place. Like someone had set it down there and walked away. Sat on my haunches by it, feet pointing at Chimère St. and Byson across the canal. Reached out a hand as if picking a flower for a lover, gloveless. Held it between thumb and forefinger and anticipated the sting, brushing it up and down my underarm over the area where your tattoo goes. Expecting, in vain, the skin to react at all.
~
I walk the street to Leone avenue. There’s a lingerie shop on the corner
next to the Serbian café. I walk past men, thick
with hair on their arms, face and chests. They do not call to me in the street,
busy with their espressos.
And I stand
to admire a balcony bra with dusty pink straps.
The female street musician claims a tango on her violin.
The bra has embroidered nettles on them, I think
of the hands of him, blistering, his air sucked through clenched teeth. At home I dance in the open window, a lonesome nettle tango.
~
The potion shop on the far end of Leone Avenue is legally required to inform me that their love potions don’t work. Still, in my bathroom at midnight I follow the instructions on the roundbottom alchemical-style bottle to a fault: bruise the nettle leaf and place it under your tongue, say the object’s name until your mouth goes dry, then drink me.
When I wake up tomorrow I will call you up and I will ask to come over and I will ask to share your bed. When I wake up, the day after tomorrow, I will love you again.
~
I loved you
your thighs
up against my legs which I had not shaved. They prick your
legs like nettles. Outside the sun rise,
outside the sun rises, outside
the sun
whispers this love is a room and I am alone here. Your old cafetiere is gone from my kitchen counter.
Your apartment is strewn with empty bottles and your tattooed arms embrace me with their painted on pretend permanence but I
linger.
My brassiere visible through a sheer blouse and your sheer eyes say – this love is a room, with a courtyard, overgrown with nettles.
— Your face is unshaven.
~
The same second as you stepped down from the balcony ledge halfway across town, apparently deciding that the fall wouldn’t kill you or that it was too cold or that you didn’t really want it, not like that, I was watching the shadow under a bridge refuse to freeze over and got a nosebleed because of you. I thought something might grow in the red spots and I thought of you as I pinched my nose and tilted my head back and watched the sky thinking, irrationally angry, I was missing the action from the warring factions under the bridge.
~
Rue de la Huchette becomes a tied cherry stem in my mouth,
the sober mood all knotted up in the jazz the musician spreads
out over the piano like a wife;
all solemn vows and sharp lines made with his hands. The blood
rushes to my face. You can’t look away.
It is nothing but a fantasy between the cobble stones of the street,
spilled there like two euro wine, it was not a loss, but a baptism of the moment.
A single drop of blood from you, a single sentence spoken in
loss and utter devotion.
The sting and burn
of your hands on my arm where a tattoo of a single nettle rests.
~
~
~
A collaboration with Cecilie K, originally posted on our tumblrs, with the motif of nettle leaves. The even-numbered pieces, more poem-like than mine, are hers. The others are mine. You may find Cecilie’s writing in books or on her tumblr, by following the following links:
createspace.com/5853622
ceciliewriteswords.tumblr.com
Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost 