EMMA SIMINGTON


Tamborine Mountain / Full-time bisexual, Often-times Poet, Songstress & Skateboarder

Self-isolation/household includes someone who is immunocompromised/Watching about the same amount of porn as before/ Working from home

Poetry burst from Emma Simington in childhood. She writes to cope, and to love.



𓅔




I'm walking through a city. It looks like the Times Square bit of New York, but it isn't. A handsome man (thin, wiry, black hair, stubble — a type I'm not aware I have) wants me to come back to his hotel room. It is mid-afternoon, distinctively so. It's how 1pm always is, you know when the sun is the colour of the Vanilla Coke bottle cap. When everything is simultaneously G and R rated. Pure. He's got an Italian accent, my suitor. He says something about needing me for a survey, or to share with his group. I'm walking with him, not listening. Kind of just drinking it in, all that light. The signs are lit, there's unbroken neon lines reaching into the bright blue sky. I want to be in everything. We near his hotel (I just seem to know this), and I say, "I want to suck your dick." He shakes his head laughing and opens a brown motel door.

There's a crowd of maybe seven people inside. A circle of them, in chairs. My suitor starts to explain that I wanted to perform fellatio but actually all I would need to do is share my experiences with the group. It's like AA. I'm still not really listening, or believing him. I want to give oral sex to him, and I'm happy to do it for the whole group...

... the scene changes ...

I'm traveling to New York with my mother and at least one of her sisters. I'm being roped into joining a religion. A cult, or so I think to myself as we (fly?). But, it sounds like luxury so I've agreed. We arrive to a grassy front yard that rolls into a gutter like dip then flattens and sits before a removable style house. There's bamboo poles everywhere, tied with red straps. I realise suddenly that the house is made from them. It's open to the air, to the night.

This is NOT luxury. The leader of the group is irritating. He's short, has Albert Einstein's hair if he was in his early forties, blue/grey and curling up to white tips. Sits at his table, the head, and holds raucous court over the group. There's actually no one in the group. Just me, not at the table, and my mother (who is quickly becoming a Jewish version of Selina Tusitala Marsh, with one of those caps the men wear instead of her sacred stick), and my aunt.

As I sulk, teenager-ish, I look at my phone. It's my first phone, a tiny little samsung that cost my dad $79 from JBHIFI when I was 15. I have a message from my good friend Khloe Kardashian:

"It's lovely and warm here. You should come, we miss you."

Khloe Kardashian is one of my dearest friends. I can see her laying on a huge bed, with pink beige silk sheets. Clothed, obviously. The curtains seem to be made from moth's wings and spider's webs, and they cascade up to the ceiling of the room, which itself is made of angular golden glass. I've missed the Kardashians so much. I belong here and, as it turns out, I am here. I'm in the room, walking in from a balcony towards Koko, having come in from gazing down at the city. We're definitely in New York. A penthouse floor of one of those tall, tall buildings that overlook central park. I glance back over my shoulder and, in addition to NYC I see Santorini. It's 1pm in Santorini outside, the sun over the sea is creamy.

For a moment, I wonder if I feel so happy because I am Kim Kardashian. It would make sense, after all. Somehow, I know that I'm not. I'm me. Khloe gets up to embrace me. In those mere seconds, I feel I belong. But before she reaches me, I fill up with love, with Vanilla Coke bottle cap sunlight —

and I wake.


(17/4/2020)
 
© Neptune and Manisha Anjali

© Neptune and Manisha Anjali