And I still can’t bear to unfriend him
Though elsewhere I have forced my eyes
To slake themselves on other boys, other
Smiles. The final act of separation still
Carries with it the stench of profanity like
He is the five o’clock news, like his daily
Murmur of living somehow matters and
It does. I don’t know what I’d do without
It and though it guilts me, guts me with
My own gutlessness, I keep it safe; the
Fold of it inflates like an echo chamber,
Like the pen of his voice still sounding out
From the inside.
Freya Jackson is a young writer from Leeds, Yorkshire (UK). She has previously been published in Writing Maps, The Curly Mind, Hapex, Defenestrationism.net and Scarlet Leaf Review. She won the Turing’s World Short Story Award (England) in 2013 and was a finalist for the 2015 Princemere Poetry Prize.