Pardon my thirst.

When I pierce the midnight storm

I am more arrow than man
the way the rain thinning above

is more fangs than water.

Two shadows away, a stranger
sits in a mist dress

lit only by the last burning embers
of his cigarette. He sees me and my thirst
and says

you must be after something sinister to be out after dark.

I respond by reaching the street, knees first.
My skin,
tooth-marked by night’s bite,
absorbs whatever little moisture it can

and I beg

for some thing other than a swallow
to nest
in this summer-dry sponge

of a mouth.

With the fire of his cigarette now drowned,
I see him sucked

by the black

and I, facing upwards,
make a glass
out of my open lips

and tongue.

With a mouth full, I finally drink that night.

I drink it slowly.

Christos Kalli, born in Larnaca, Cyprus, is currently studying for his undergraduate degree in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has recently been accepted by the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford for a postgraduate degree. His poetry has been translated into French and shortlisted for the Jane Martin Poetry Prize, and his chapbook INT. NIGHT was a finalist for the Sutra Press Chapbook Contest. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from the American Journal of Poetry, the Adroit Journal, the Los Angeles Review, the minnesota review, PANK, The Hollins Critic, and Dunes Review, among others. He is a Poetry Reader at/for the Adroit Journal. Visit him at christoskalli.com

Zivania