Harris Coverley

RED ON SILVER

It's running right out of me...running right out, beside me, onto the floor. I did nothing to him...I walked past him, the pallid and wiry guy in the hoodie leaning against the post...he asked me something, I didn’t quite get it. He pulled his right hand out of his left pocket...I felt the blade in me before I saw it retract: red on silver, shining in the streetlight, the flash of neon. And now it’s running right out of me...pooling at my side. I’m accosted by soft voices...a stranger’s coat dragged over me, smelling of alien sweat, bitter and foul, but I can’t complain. There is murmuring and chatter and whispers and giggles...the screaming has stopped, not mine of course...I don’t have much energy left to scream, or even to mumble. And it’s still running right out of me...on and on. Everything around me is a ghost, an outline, a rough blur. There’s a flashing blue light either a million metres or a thousand miles away that refuses to come any closer, and a woman with dyed black hair and dull green eyes in a white leather jacket whom I’ve never met before keeps telling me that it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay...okay, okay...and yet still...it’s running right out of me...into the gutter and down the drain...all those years, waiting for the languorous rain to come out of the blue night and wash it all away...


Harris's YouTube video reading of "Red on Silver":



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Harris confesses: "This is actually a complete re-write of a poem from several years ago. There had been a massive spate of stabbings across Britain, and having just been walking around the city centre the realisation came to me that there was no particular reason why I couldn’t possibly be a victim."


"Along with previously in The Five-Two, HARRIS COVERLEY has had verse published in Polu Texni, California Quarterly, Star*Line, Spectral Realms, Scifaikuest, Novel Noctule, Better Than Starbucks, Corvus Review, The Cannon's Mouth, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, View From Atlantis, and many others. He lives in Manchester, England.