In the middle of the night

in the middle of a shared pandemic

I lay on my back not falling to pieces
in the middle of the clay-pans

in the middle of three-ways

I am falling into peace
concealing my eyes in the middle of rapture

inhaling their Requiem of silence in D Minor

I frolic in the middle of denial
if it pleases the jury of midnight recovery

and all that glitters is not quite sold

I crave the cravings of my Jewish lover

her middle-finger figure-skating around

the outskirt of my arching sovereign mouth
over there, where – against the rocks of

somebody else’s songlines

she and her gather well-heeled in the middle of

an open fire-engine-red chaise longue 
pressing if we must

into scalloped watercolours

dividing rehearsals all over again,

and again, and again
in the middle of a raftless desert-sea

I catch a fallen star from the ankle of a

petulant Milky Way

placing it firmly inside my lover’s middle pocket
in the middle of nowhere

yet someone else’s somewhere

remunerating each other’s unravelling limbs

in dialogue for spare body parts

suddenly, in the middle of an unordinary stanza

I choose to release her Hebrew stare
in the middle of a shared odyssey

halfway through mid-sentence

syphoning the foam

between Scylla and Charybdis
ego aside

my therapist survives
Whilst I, the sometime poet

by the bye return to my lovers’

unpublished womb        


Yvette Henry Holt

Bidjara, ī́man|Yiman, Wakaman,

Occasional Poet