I. Recording the beginning of a relationship is easy: the first date, the first kiss, the first fumbling blowjob in the Jeep on the roof of that parking garage with Roxette playing softly on the radio. The first I love you, a not unfamiliar phrase, but come our first anniversary we have to count backwards simply to settle on the date. Only the truly precious couples mark the first argument, and the next memorable argument is the last argument we’ll ever have. The argument that ends all arguments, after which we, should we ever argue again, will be nothing more than two people who fucked for a while, perhaps lived together for a time, arguing. But not yet.
II. I steal lemons and you make lemonade. It isn’t this many lemons, or this much juice, to which this much water is added, and this much sugar to that. As many lemons as I bring home, and as much juice as they contain. Stolen from around the corner where the yellow trumpet flowers grow, and that man burned his hand shooting fireworks on the Fourth. Or else from the driveway halfway down the block while teetering on a jungle-green garbage bin. Warm water from the sink until the color is just right, and sugar until the mixture tastes sweet enough.
“Femme” by Martins Deep
III. The woman on the cableway asked if we were brothers. Friends my grandmother tried her best to explain. Visiting from America. (Before my first trip to Cleveland you liked to joke that you had traveled three times across the globe for me while I hadn’t crossed the country for you even once.) It was the woman and her young grandson, and the three of us—you, my grandmother, and myself—on a painful ascent up the side of that mountain. We don’t make it ugly is what my grandmother said on that very first trip, meaning that we never touch, or kiss, or cling in public. I did not tell her that we had learned not to, and so endure the awkward silences instead.
IV. But there are also those silences when my eyes are red and puffy, and I don’t have to worry about explaining a thing. Not the clunky jewelry, or the funky clothing still in plastic bins, or the five cats living in what is now only my father’s house, with more in the garage and on the porch. I don’t have to explain illness, or deterioration, or death, or deathbed vigils, praying for the end while at the same time once more coaxing life into an empty shell. You’ll remember the trip to Alcatraz, her hair had fallen out and she was walking with a cane, and the sickly sweet sweet potato casserole she would make for us while you molested the turkey on Thanksgiving.
V. Sometimes I too liked to joke—South Africa boasted wild animals and wide open spaces, while Cleveland promised four cold months of snow and ice and a filthy lake. Every time you joked, usually to friends over a glass of wine, it was in fact a jab gently reminding me that I still owed you one. I couldn’t deny it and didn’t try to, but you bided your time and booked my ticket: an unexpected pang at leaving an unfamiliar place accompanied me home. Four months of snow and a filthy lake turned out to be much more than that, as you repeatedly tried to tell me.
VI. I once wrote you a poem about that shirt in your closet—the blue one with the hundred yellow suns. Most of my old poetry rightly makes me cringe, but I dreamed of reading this one to you someday: They are called keyhole limpets / those shells whose names you couldn’t remember yesterday / the ones that I put in the pocket of your shirt / so that they wouldn’t break or get lost… Some shells are lost, some forever broken, and even a hundred yellow suns must burn out eventually—but not yet.
Jean-Luke Swanepoel
Jean-Luke Swanepoel was born in South Africa, and currently lives in California with his partner. His work has previously appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Lunch Ticket, and Litro Magazine, and he is the author of The Thing About Alice, published in 2020.
Martins Deep (he/him) is a poet based in Kaduna, Nigeria. He is a photographer, digital artist, & currently an undergraduate student of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He is a Pushcart nominee, & a Best of The Net finalist, '22. His most recent works have appeared—or are forthcoming— in Magma Poetry, Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Barren Magazine, Lolwe, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, & elsewhere. If he's not out taking photographs, fantasizing reincarnating as an owl as he sniffs the pages of old books in a room he barely leaves, he's on a newsboy hat tweeting @martinsdeep1.