sugar season

Bonnie Hogan

@wordsby_bon

summer 

when roads are warm beneath bare feet and windows are kept open to escape the heat and sweat falls from chins and slides down tummies and skin sticks to leather before peeling away half-heartedly / when we become coconut-oil limbs and neon-pink bikinis, static-sandpaper mouths and white-noise deliriums / when cheeks turn cherry-red beneath pepper-shaker freckles and sheets turn wet under shiny-pretzeled torsos and even when I’m too slick, too slippery to hold your tongue makes wine out of mine / bittersweet merlot / strings tug undone and heads loll into one as you breathe summer into my lungs ‘til I swear I’ve swallowed the sun / I dribble out your name and it comes out yellow / when you leave I feel like carpet burn or velcro, but it’s okay / I’ll just bathe in aloe vera until I can no longer feel the pang.

 

sweet-tooth

you held the old needle of my record player between your fingers far gentler than you ever held me / not that I’m complaining / I liked the sting of calluses and tender skin between wine-stained teeth that only moments before were hidden behind your lips as you refused to show me the narrow front gap as if I hadn’t already seen it / as if you didn’t already know I spent most mornings playing with it / clouded-peach beams dancing across your eyelids as I tried to guess how many grains of sugar it would take to fill it or how many times it would take for my tongue to slide into it like a shell or a burrow without even thinking / you noticed my fingernails digging into my palm before I do, but you don’t say anything/ you grabbed my hand almost absentmindedly and without missing a beat of Lucy in the Sky you flipped me over onto my stomach and take me / further into myself than I’d ever been.

 

peaking 

I had a dream last night that when I bit your lip my teeth sunk through it like you were made of soft cheese and you didn’t even scream you just pulled me closer in until you were all around me and I have never felt so safe besides that one day in that tent when it was raining so heavy the grass outside was a pool but we were warm and our pupils were huge and your chest was rising and falling so steadily that I remembered the rhythm in which my heart should be beating and you told me how much you loved me and I swear to god the glitter stuck to my cheeks didn’t even come close to the sparkling bursts and streams I saw behind my eyelids as we hid all dry and squishy and high in that green-tinted monsoon island.

Bonnie is a third-year creative writing student with a passion for delving into the depth of human emotion. Her poetry and prose often experiment with sensory-based image-ry/metaphors, dream-inspired content/visuals and an immersive second person point of view. Bonnie endeavours to provide her readers with an experience both familiar and fresh, encouraging a safe space for intimate introspection as she explores themes of love, lust, femininity, perspective and identity.

More of Bonnie’s works can be found in Issue One of Scratch That Magazine.

She can be found on Instagram at wordsby_bon.