When Fish Swim Upstream

When purple dresses meet fake moustaches and amigos in sombreros.

When funking beats meet floors sticking and filling with raging feet, when smoking green-skies meet seas of grey and swimming kisses spill in spiralling waves.

When knees curving meet smooth lines and falling becomes landing on islands of sand, when one-fifth-of-a-second meets dopamine and ensuing your heart becomes your brain leading the dance.

When giggling children meet buried teddy-bears and visions of chameleons become subtle flirtations, when jumping fences meet nauseating noises and encounters become exchanges in stolen medications.

When poems meet dreams and preamble sleep so that sleeping becomes out-of-reach.

When swimming fish meet frogs croaking and nothing in everything is anything but absent, when a sentence meets a blank-space and structuring sentences becomes obsolete nonsense.

When chicken-coups meet cats engaged in fine-balancing acts and kisses become fast flurried facts.

When contradiction meets unwilling-to-apologise and entering realms of don't-give-a-fuckedy-fuck becomes unable-to-compromise.

When skin meets touch and absorbing falling rain becomes broken desert days, when hesitating-coups meet funambulist-cats and whimsical-poppies become shipshape-facts, when happen meets happening and what happened becomes finding what was lost in dusty clouds of lust.

When blossoming cursives meet feathered dreams and whitewashed tombs become fish swimming upstream.

When too-little-too-late meets too-much-too-soon and still-frames are delivered at departure-gates.

When until biros meet envelopes, and stamps fly over purple skylines, and limitless crevasses become sensuous red-taped letters, when until all this can be sealed and delivered and surrendered in a simple kiss.

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Stevi-Lee Alver is an Australian writer and tattoo artist. She lives in the middle of Brazil with her wife. She loves bush walks and waterfalls but misses the ocean.

'When Fish Swim Upsteam' won the Class of 1940 Creative Writing Award for Poetry at the University of Massachusetts, March 2014