there you are again

Jemma Green

Content Warning: Sexual scenes

I meet him in the kitchen, in cigarette-stove-top light. Outside, rain makes the windows weep, August sliding over glass, the cold sliding our bodies closer together.

‘What do you want to do?’

We’re drinking coffee from cracked mugs. Steam fogs his glasses. On TV there’s a horror film— something from the 70s, without clarity or sound. Actors, blood-red, moaning like Munch. Its flickering, consecutive scenes pass over my eyelids, closed against his touch.

‘I can think of something.’

He has swift, candid hands. They’re making marks. We’re on his couch, the one that sinks so abysmally deep that I am lost in its threaded seams. His lips, my throat, the night splashed over us.

And you.

I squint in the dark, your hazy body incorporeal, spotted in the milky edges of my sight. You watch from the shadows of the wall, an unseen voyeur. You are obscure. You are glaring. It is always like this. You are always with me.

He doesn’t notice, just slips straps from my shoulders. Sensations of pleasure, gentle fodder. My goose-fleshed forearms. The ridged column of my back. He remarks on my skin.

‘Cute birthmark.’

But you already know it’s there—the smear along my spine. You know the cartography of me better than anyone. Do you think of me now? The scent of my perfume, does it linger on your sheets? My shape, the print of my fingertips?

‘Thanks.’

We continue. He makes himself familiar with the hitch in my breath. Between my palms, his hair is soft. His jaw angular. I taste the coffee we drank on his tongue. I taste an echo—imagined, impossible—of you.

My limbs are taut strings, tuned too far to play. I look to you, gone from the wall. An apparition of affection, disappeared. I cannot do this. I am not ready.

‘Wait.’

He stops, teeth ghosting lines of cellulite. There is a question in his eyes, lidded, hungry, content with uncommitted passion. Looking up at me, I cannot remember his name. It is yours I want to say, your pupils that eclipse his, your breath in his lungs.

I am sick with wanting, desire, all-encompassing hunger; with an obsessive infatuation, wholly infectious; with something raw, inherent, an obsession stuck under my skin; sick with hopeless need and a complete devotion to you.

I let him continue his touches, his fervent love. I close my eyes. Pretend I am in a bed I have been in too little times. Deep in my mind, in the amorous black, you and I meet.

There you are again.

Author: Jemma Green is an emerging writer and editor based in Meanjin/Brisbane who is currently in her final year of a BFA Creative Writing at QUT. With publications in Glass, Forget Me Not Press, FROCKET, and ScratchThat, she is the winner of a 2022 AWC writing contest and is a facilitator for a pop-up salon at the QWC’s 2024 QPoetry! event. Working fluidly between forms, she writes both prose and poetry, focusing on a combination of intimate emotion and a lush use of language.

Artist: Callum Ross-Rowland (he/him) is a Meanjin (Brisbane)-based creative writing student at QUT. He was the 2023 Literary Salon’s Photographer with his recent Diploma in Photo Imaging from Billy Blue (Torrens). He was recently shortlisted for Photographer of the Year in the Animal and Nature category and regularly photographs for Artful Heads magazine, where he captures portraits of artists from different mediums. Find him on Instagram @alrightatart. 

Edited by: Ricky Jade and Elly LaRoche