By Maddy Pope

Today I have a bruise on my arm and it has sore shoulders and a gap between his teeth. 

He likes celery and broad beans and when the sky has no clouds so it looks like the sea turned upside down. 

The bruise is tired and needs to do laundry and likes to drink tea with no milk. 

Bruise doesn’t exist in any temporality, bruise is all grown up and not yet born and only believes in the stars and never in the calendar. 

Bruise likes cranberry juice but finds the colour off-putting. 

Bruise finds it difficult not to fall into other people. 

He wishes he was made with set limits instead of bleeding into his friends. 

He worries he could keep expanding forever until he isn’t even a bruise but a darkness. Bruise thinks he is afraid of the dark, he gets up early even when his eyes hurt and his head is scratchy. 

He likes to watch the sun rise like some naked electric bulb, like some technology that is not god at all, but science. 

Bruise would like to visit somewhere hot.

Bruise dreams in numbers 

– exact quantities and perfect answers and neat brackets hugging everything close. 

Bruise would like to be held close by something that is not himself. 

Bruise is afraid of being held close by anyone

Bruise was born through violence. 

Bruise listens to audiobooks about car mechanics and Buddhism and war and healthy eating. 

He likes to hear other people talking

He likes to know that people care about things, if not people. 

Bruise likes to believe people care about people too. 

He wonders what he would talk about if he had a podcast. 

Sometimes bruise cries at all the food in the supermarkets, 

He finds something very vulnerable in the neatly stacked chocolate bars,

He loves that all the food is the same. 

Bruise wishes he could live in a packet,

Before he goes to sleep he imagines how cosy it would be to have a wrapper. 

Bruise dreams about leaving home and starting a new life where no one knows him, 

He would like to have a farm and his own land. 

He would like things to be his own.

The problem is bruise doesn’t have the language or the understanding to leave, 

His time runs away like lukewarm water 

Like a godforsaken child.

Bruise doesn’t know how to leave,

He doesn’t know the difference between leaving and disappearing.