SARA KÄRPÄNEN

YOU ASKED ME WHY I CRIED

I said, “I’m fine,” but actually

I thought about the broken ribs

and I thought about her BDSM experiences

I thought about the LGBTQ communities

and I thought about Virginia Woolf

I thought about my empty room

I thought about the sun’s rays entering my now-old living room

I thought about his flat nose and his Ray Bans and how much I wanted to touch his hair

I thought about the trips I had ahead

I thought about all the things I stored and put into cardboard boxes

I thought about the Instagram photos and the followers and their whatever comments

I thought about the dreams I had with big cocks

and I thought about the cold sweats

I thought about the traffic and the tattoos I had gotten

And the year that had passed that I was now thinking about, crying

(I thought about how tired I had become of hating everything you said.)

LOVER

Find a lover

who will treat

your flower

like it deserves a crown

who will let you moan aloud

who’s not afraid of the power inside your thighs.

THE GIRLS WHO GO TO THERAPY

We are the girls who go to therapy

Green parka, bleached hair, red lipstick,

our eyes meet.

We hold the door, we smile, we say, “thank you, that was kind.”

We lock the door behind us,

We sit alone in a café,

exhale aloud.

We take a bath on Tuesday night,

listen to nothing but our pounding hearts

We mute the words, come back to our mother’s womb

to be reborn

to unlearn

to unleash the stuckness, the toxic masculinities

we call cultural norms.

We are the girls who go to therapy.

FALLING

“People fall in and out of love like this,

all the time.”

I didn’t fall out of love with you.

I fell out of love with myself, when I was with you.

FRUIT FLIES

I will not be the ellipsis on your lips

that leads nowhere.

The silence that follows the “but" after “I find you so attractive.”

Silence so long I could disappear there

(I don’t need to hear the rest.)

I’m not here to do that, to ease your cravings when they come to keep away the memories of your ex, on a Sunday night.

We are on different islands

and I say this like I’d say it to a friend,

a friend I actually like:

My roots are tucked into soil and you are floating, like those flies above the fruit bowl, drunk and lost

“I love the way you smell,” you whisper, next to my back, pushing your fingers inside, making me gasp.

THERE'S NO FIX IN NETFLIX

No one else

can fix me.

Not you, not him, not her

No one else

can fix me.

Not the parties we go to,

not the bombs and drops we take

that make everything spin fast

so that none of us have to ask,

“How long does this last?”

No one else can fix me.

Not the one who I wake up with the next morning,

not the brunch we eat and the coffee we drink to ease our aching heads

Not the cigarettes we smoke

while watching the city turn pink

before the sky swallows the light

like a veil, before it disappears in front us into the night

No one else can fix me.

Not the Netflix we watch to tire our minds

Not the joints we smoke before bedtime

that feels like cotton pads covering our eyes

No one else

can fix this

where

solitude

softly lands.

NOTHING SPECIAL

Unlike you think, your love is not special

Unlike you think, your pain is not special

Unlike you think,

you are special.

242

I’m looking inside a house:

three people on a couch, living room, orange glow,

242 towards St. Pauls passing below

the brakes creak, the bus coughs, tired sound, pale passengers inside, like corpses, shallow souls, heads tilted down, staring at their phones, light reflecting on their isolated faces. Empty soda bottle rolling on the floor, back and forth, outside the air smells like grease, it’s heavy of oil and acid rain. For seconds the streets are painted with red and blue, the sirens scream, people shout, hum and drum, the everyday, the normal life.

I’m staring at the street beneath, a breeze of wind touching my cheek. There's someone, looking at me, our eyes meet, the bus comes, the moment's gone, another nightmare, another day, another dream.

NOVEMBER

The smell of you is tattooed in my nostrils and won’t go away.

I could get drunk of that smell alone.

SUNDAY

There’s a taste of iron in your mouth. The remains of cocaine, from yesterday.

“Are you insane?” words echoing in my ears.

Don’t pray, I beg, please, stay, without asking, demanding, whispering, when the room bathes in afternoon light, we were supposed to leave hours ago, now it’s midday, day ruined, my mother would say, but I don’t move,

instead, I lie on my back, “touch me” yes you may and you mumble something like, “I thought you were hungry, don’t you want breakfast” and I hesitate but reply anyway, “I’m not finished yet” and you look at me, and you do touch me, far away, like I’m almost not there and now I can disappear, in the sheets I won’t smell again, in this t-shirt I’m not going to wear again,

and I almost come and we go in the sunshine, the sun is too bright, the sky is too blue and we have eggs for breakfast and we kiss goodbye,

the end.

VICTORIA PARK

The trees bent above me like an old man’s spine,

Their twigs were reaching the sky, which was turning from light blue to dark yellow.

The spaciousness made me feel safe, it held me tight.

I don’t know when the trees had undressed their leaves, but I hadn’t noticed that before.

I must have been asleep for a long time.

SEX FLASHBACK

We’re sitting in a bar, Sunday night, just the two of us

Two glasses of house wine

A man in his fifties, on his own, sits at the corner table with his iPhone. I see another one now, my age, rushing through the glass doors, dragging his suitcase, his mobile home, face frozen and now he's gone, the lights dim in the bar, you are telling a story, and I zoom out—

Instead, I think about

the time when my skin became a map

the slow exploration of your left hand

leaving traces,

like heart-shaped roses

and I remember the rhythm and the slap

that now makes my eyes blink too fast

and you ask me if I’m alright

I say, yes, just a flashback

and I raise my glass

to the sudden memories, to the sex flashbacks.

LONGING 

If I tuck into,

into this longing I feel for you

it finds it feet

where hurt normally has its home

how can

love

feel

so close to pain?

MY MOTHER’S WOUNDS

The fear of facing sorrow

The fear of facing solitude

Our mother’s sadness, which we carry in our hearts,

a puddle of suppressed emotions.

There’s an ocean inside,

trying to come out,

waves slapping the shore,

words staying stuck like

the lump in my throat.

NICE GIRLS

Come home,
have a shower,
change clothes—
different underwear, same bra
brush our teeth
meet them in the park
be normal, laugh aloud, be quiet,
tell a lie
have a smoke, another ale, get high
read a book, rest on their chest

They say,

“Can I take you home,
do you like this,
let’s go there,
it was so nice,
xo xx”

And we say nothing back
they never think
we could do that
but it’s not a game, see;
it’s the unspoken rules
we learned to play.

LIES

The lies boys tell you to get upstairs:

• I want to see your paintings
• Let’s smoke a spliff on the rooftop
• I just want to hold you all night
• Let’s have one more glass of wine
• I have some great mescal at mine
• I want to tell you something, inside
• I’ve never had a one-night stand in my life.

NEW ROUTE 

Look left,

choose a route,

turn right,

find a new way home,

look at the map,

look front,

slow down,

8 minutes,

you can make it,

make it home, turn the key

disappear from the sight, from the mind, people fall in and out of love like this, all the time.

HOME

The loss of losing a home.

A home that is not a house

A home that once was,

a feeling of freedom, of love,

a home that smelled like you,

a home that was anything we dared to dream of

the special secret, the never-never land

a home that is now a construction site, a wasteland

being replaced

by someone else’s life, a master plan, the luxury man

what we once had

is now in their hands

who never has the courage to understand

of the dreams we built

of what you and I, had.

LIKE A HALF-DEAD FISH

The most beautiful I’ve ever seen you,

you were broken in tiny pieces,

sharp like nails, I barely dared to touch you.

What you thought was your everything

shattered in front of you.

It got in the colour of your eyes, in the weary smile that stopped at the edges of your mouth, in the way you listened to others and closed your eyes in the middle of the crowd.

You avoided places so they wouldn’t bring you back; you tried to delete all the faces and replace them, but nothing was to last. You did everything with such intensity that it left you gasping air on the floor like a half-dead fish.

But that’s better than not feeling anything, you told me, "at least I know I am alive."

TWO HALVES

I had no idea

sorrow had so many stages

break up

[phrasal verb of break]

1.

disintegrate or disperse.

"the grey clouds had begun to break up"

We are breaking up,

breaking into two halves, which once were, at least, felt like one.

We are breaking up the dreams we built

tearing off the puzzles that fit together so well

that they even made a “click” sound when they met

We are breaking up the “we” into you and me,

deciding on our own,

what, when, how, with whom, and where

I have accepted that fact

but I never knew

how many stages grief will have,

it keeps coming to me

I’m reminded what we once used to have.

PILLOW TALK

Here’s for you, love:

Not sleeping with anyone is fine.

It is not a failed Saturday night.

Taking a cab home, Uber pool, alone.

Waking up, no strangers’ arms around.

No blocked nose

no bruises on the thighs

the first thought, it occurs,

you were not high,

no one touched you last night

It’s new, it's new to you

to be on your own,

to hear the gaps between your thoughts

it’s new to you.

PARODY 

The restlessness of us is tangible.

We want to get pissed, we want to forget, we want to get low, we try not to exist.

Remember me

Remember me

Remember me

Are you thinking of me, now?

The parody of us, of our time.