Lukewarm

Lukewarm

Nina Babic

Neither hot nor cold,
I trace the shape of news pixels: the tailings of a world that keeps spewing on
but doesn’t hurt me from where I am sitting still over my dinner bowl of milk going sour again.

Lukewarm from crown to the roots,
I am immoveable in the face of famine plays and certain demise splitting the screen into a billion
fragmentary cries for help that I cannot pull out and soothe into nothing.

Why do I continue to pollute the living room like this?
My heart won’t stop pumping noxious fumes
into an atmosphere that never asked me to be here, and yet I continue to spectate on the cracks.

The irreducible call I cannot answer,
and yet I still lean on the edge of everything, listening to the end of the world through holes in
the wall, and the entire house will break into two pieces with me quaking in the crumbling heap.

The agonizing core of me cries:
I want to be held so badly, but the miraculous pair of hands I seek are not part of this existence.
They belong to another world, a formless one that says touch me not for I am not yet ascended.

My hesitant nature wouldn’t satisfy God.
A man would spit me out of his mouth, the mild taste not enough to chew down or swallow,
choking on these pieces of rubber that cling to the teeth.

Neither hot nor cold,
this heart of mine pumps in a lukewarm gesture under my breastbone, not enough
to slow down the tide of sinking skyscrapers or eliminate the colossal wasteland on the porch.

If the art of spectatorship could save us,
I would burn my eyeballs into sockets if it could stop the world from breaking up over my gaze,
and the ball of the earth would resurface where I would still love it blind and helpless.

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Nina Babic
Poet & Student

Nina is a Carleton University student and poet from Ottawa, Ontario. She finds inspiration in art history, Catholic mysticism, and trying not to feel doomed. This is her first digital publication.

Photography by Francisco Andreotti