2979-2762 The Hythe Review 2979-2762 Open Library of Humanities 10.16995/thr.29430 Poetry Capital L Lasoye Sarah slasoye@gmail.com 10 07 2026 2026 1 1 1 3 Copyright: © 2026 The Author(s) 2026 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

A new poem by Sarah Lasoye.

for Jordi

i am very busy trying not to need you too much. you pass through me my love and i’m like the land at harvest. fine toothed and run ragged. a salted

rim and an xl bully. i’m so sorry but my jaw has simply closed around the idea of you. i pleat my words together. stitch a skirt to

disguise their weight. one day i’m caught in the rain and can’t stand up. you can’t stand it either all those wet words i wear for you around my waist i

arrive home and you crack me open like something crisp and refreshing. i fizz. yes i do believe that in my life there is an edge and i

can get to it. i fold in my own hands and you fold over my smacked lips. at the strangest moments i find your hair in my mouth. a chill runs down me

like the slim fingers of a harpist. three tugs equals one shudder and it’s a fact i love! the harp is the most percussive string instrument.

i think about which of us will outlive the other. which is to say i think of the bright colours of your life frescoed across the ceiling of me. i think of myself

sun printed against the heat and across the surface of you. neither of us ‘last’ neces- sarily. i think what i’m trying to do with you is glove

myself within myself. i think what i’m trying to do is take my heart make multiple incisions [a million little lashes] and fan it out like an accordion.

play my love on the street corner. you are one of those people who press the full weight of themselves into the ground. you

sink into yourself like a talon and teach me that

pleasure is as good a guiding principle as any.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.