#1
#1
Edition
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POETRY
Spring 2022
peter scalpello

eight days
Returning to my mother’s home
I discover she already knows
I am a faggot since she overheard
someone say it on the bus with evidence
that I didn’t want to sleep
with a sex worker in Amsterdam
The same route
by stout river where from
the window of a sports car shouts
POOF! and to my left a man
sings IRA into tobacco tins
Where the days spent coming
down in bed could make up
the years between us and I am sick
up things I didn’t even know
were inside me
\
Everybody at the pub is talking
about their childhood and I have
to go it’s like being back
in the P.E. changing room except
we’re all adults and the world
is burning
I am this person again
incompatible with another for
suppressing the same potential
and confronted with it anew
at the culmination of a
stranger’s afterparty
\
I have realised in reverse
that she and I both
were sad and confused at the same
time just hadn’t clocked
our act of blurring from
and for each other
That I took a loan
out on myself so that
when the dust is swept
away the broom is put back
in the closet
PETER SCALPELLO is a queer poet and sexual health therapist from Glasgow. Their work has appeared in Five Dials, fourteen poems, Granta, Gutter, and harana poetry, among other publications. Their first collection of poetry, Limbic, is published by Cipher Press. TWITTER
KALE CHESNEY is a queer photographer and designer living in Portland, Oregon. A visual storyteller, they received a BA from University of Santa Cruz in Printmaking and Photography. They grew up in the country, collect cameras, and avoid cilantro at all cost. Website. Instagram.
(Image credit: 4 pm - some years ago, 35mm Kale Chesney, by kind permission of the artist.)