Date idea: you commit a crime and then I hunt you relentlessly for 17 years in single-minded pursuit of bringing you to justice

we pound the pavements of the 19th century 

               and I collect catches of you in long lit shadows

                              in fragments of song

across the faces of clocks

I want to ruin you in the Rue Montmartre

               throw you against the wall of some institution

                              and cover your throat with my hands

the lambent glow of barely repressed homoeroticism

alight in our every move, and

this I swear by the stars I will find you in a moment of vulnerability

(announcing myself via musical motif linked melodically to 

your trauma)

               in order to most effectively degrade 

your humanity, I will take your name from you

replacing it with the swallowed hiss 

of cold mathematics

you can threaten me with violence in return, 

reluctantly at first, then with feeling

all the whispered promise of your superior physical presence 

welling through the string section

and then

when the horns come in

I’ll know you really mean it ……….

God

I want to be so stern and uncompromising for you

               I want to reenact my inability to form 

healthy attachments

each time we meet 

                                             repeat

our own names like a talisman

like a pathology

My name 

is Jean Valjean                                                                

And I am Javert!

                                                                           Do not forget my name!

Do  

not  

forget

me

it’s 

romantic as fuck

to be honest

like

a thousand first dates       

               a thousand ways to hold your wretched mouth

between my teeth

               every time, you are new to me

scientists call it 

“misattribution of arousal”

which is when your body sends you a little note to say

it’s pretty sure you’re about to die…………..

only your reading comprehension isn’t great

but personally, I like to call it 

                                             FATE

as you and I

treasured enemy

make vow to one another

in perfect unison

I swear to you

I will be there

Participation Points

(you are ERYXIMACHUS)

You like to go home early from every party,

when it passes a particular hour. Specifically,

the hour of carrying balloon animals around in your chest,

and walking in on people you don’t know

doing vodka shots out of White Aladdin’s belly button.

the body is the origin point…..………..

of embarrassment,

like the vestigial nipple.

It is an uneasy relationship

between the trans body

and the medical profession.

To participate is to become garden moss.

to spring genially beneath the heel

of a gardener unfamiliar

with your genus.

The body is an outpouring

of humours, and fluids, and grief. To love is

to heave that body against a foreign shore

and hope for the best.

Dani Yourukova is a queer Wellington writer with great hair, a bad personality, and a Masters in writing poems. Their poetry and essays have been published in places like takahē, Stasis, The Spinoff, Bad Apple, and Turbine Kapohau. Their debut poetry collection Transposium is forthcoming from Auckland University Press in spring 2023.