Yes and No

by Emma Healey

Is this the machine where we’re supposed to put that feeling? Or what? I can’t stop saying at the level of the gesture but fuck if I know, everyone’s holding a fish. Or a puppy. They just told me put it here, say what’s about you, start deciding. So: semaphore, a trailing school of shirtless ghosts all hey/yeah/haha/you into your hipbones, in a round. You have to ring like something’s struck you every time, it’s just and sucks to ask yourself what loneliness you tried to skip and got here. Plus the world in its new order coils against your dumb potential, thinned to channels. Twinned and faultless. Your desire. Some relief. All gesture claws a canyon up your ribcage now; by yourself means like conducting. Like as in the opposite of no. Don’t look again; that’s you, bright signal in among the noise and you, a steady please unfolding in the wireless. Sing it again, alone for once, for real. Say how it sounds to want to ache and to be counted.

Emma Healey is the author of Begin With the End in Mind.