"Four Seasons that Could be Poems" by Brittany Thomas

Two (or Three) Bedroom Apartment, Winter

Someone finally figured out what to do with that apple whisky – mix it with cider, apple on apple, why was that such a revelation after we tried every disgusting combination of liquids abandoned on top of the fridge? We stay in the living room, for warmth, as though the tv is a hearth we have to tend. The extremities of this apartment grow cold in unlined boots, and gather icy fuzz in unkempt corners. There’s a hole under the bathroom sink that looks clean down into the basement. There’s a third bedroom, unrented, too small, the window a hazard. We didn’t know what to do with it. We sit on the floor. We order pizza. We make tea, we eat cookies. We play a lot of Tetris. I’ve fucked at least three people in my single bed, and slept with two more that I didn’t fuck. We have four pieces of furniture that each had a life with someone else before they came to live with us. We don’t have enough to fill the third bedroom. Instead, we use it for interpretive dance, for communal naps, for processing our heartbreaks, for imagining the ceiling is a portal to places we haven’t been. We gather in on ourselves in this weird nest. We call it home.  

One Bedroom Flat, Ground Floor, Summer

We were drinking iced coffees and speaking in hypotheticals. I’m opening a museum, he said. Another sip. A museum of our time on earth. I’m putting this coffee in the museum, he said, another sip. The cup sweats. The ice cubes tink tink against each other, against the glass, against the idea that they will live in a museum. We stole that glass. We drink more coffee. We make lists for summer. We pick flowers. We sweat. We stick to the pavement, gummy. We tear the paper with our summer slick. We lay under a ceiling fan. We float on a hard-ribbed, thin mattress. We share a joint. We share our bodies and other fluids. Demolition Man is on t.v. again. We eat pickles out of the jar. We hang string lights. We re-arrange the bookshelf. We cover the water damage. We listen to records. We cross items off the list. We buy cheap beer. Tink, tink, tink. He thinks I think he’s kidding, about the museum. He presses his foot to my foot: give me something to put in the museum, what do you want to remember? This: summer skin, hale and sweet with youth. The open door. The smell of jasmine. The lines on our faces drawing a map to tomorrow, if we get there. 

Two Up Two Down, Spring

Something is supposed to bloom now: the earth, the garden, ourselves. It must be so nice to walk the river in peace and not feel the threat of the flood. I hollowed out all the rooms in my heart and one at a time I redecorated, I hoped you would like one of them eventually. We tried to call it love three times, we tried to fit three people inside and then make room for one more. We tried to call it family, we tried to call it radical. We made a mess. I hung hope around the room like new wallpaper, I deleted the old numbers, I dug up the drowned zucchini flowers. We made homemade pizza dough and beer from a kit and stored it under the stairs for three months and waited for the darkness to turn it into something we could stomach. We packed up the house. I accidentally killed two potted ivy and one peace lily on the way out – my thumbs never turned green, despite your efforts. I didn’t know spring was the saddest season.

Two Up Two Down, Another Place, Fall

The season shifts itself into slumber and we haul in a late harvest: our own skin folded into a ball and mallow cremes and tiny gourds we have no intention of eating. Why does decay smell so good? We sew our socks with the last of the sunlight, we beaver our way into darkness. We listen to the city: rain on corrugated rooftops and bus traffic clogged with damp commuters. It speaks the language of flux over and over. We put the kettle on. We open a jigsaw puzzle, we piece together another life. The grey of England’s October has shattered on my tongue more times than I can count. A friend once told me October babies are just the product of New Year romps, but every October baby in my life is the air and water to my earth: a recipe for a mud cake. We only need to add a little fire and something says we will survive the winter.

Brittany Thomas is a queer writer who was born and raised in upstate New York and currently lives in London. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Five South Journal, Major 7th Magazine, Bullshit Lit, JAKE, and Fifth Wheel Press’s Come Sail Away anthology. You can find her online @britomatic.