by ella, for bram.
when bram casey had his bad apple debut with ‘in every other universe,’ i took to instagram to declare myself his biggest fan.
it was true then, three days before i met bram for the first time, and it’s true a matching tattoo, countless glittering nights in town, two dud-chch bus trips each, at least six heartbreaks and a year and a half later. anyone who knows me knows bram (even if they haven’t met), and this has been proven to work both ways—a mutual friend of bram and i were chatting at a recent wānanga, and someone commented we must know each other quite well—
“no,” said my lovely friend, “i just hear so much about ella from bram. he adores her. i feel like i know her through him.”
for bram and i, bad apple has been a pillar—before and after we were published in it, before and after we met. i can’t speak to his experience (often we are co-writing essays like this, so now i’m feeling his absence), but in high school i would trawl the website and search for proof that my queerness was real and that i wasn’t alone. beforehand, i’d been using terms like ‘lesbian’ on the poetry foundation website and coming up with nearly nothing that resonated.
i still think about michaella batten’s ‘in another string of the multiverse, perhaps’, which i found in 2021 and has been one of the most influential and important poems on my practice and act of being—which maybe fed my overwhelming reaction to bram’s ‘in every other universe.’ in a lot of queer art, we are trying to escape, imagine ourselves a better world. bram offers another universe as a chance for someone else to grow and change so he can live out his honeydew-candy dream without paying the price of self sacrifice: “in this universe… i refuse to mutilate myself into a form that you will fuck.” beneath the layers of harsh reality, there’s a joy and strength in bram’s knowledge that he has everything he needs—even if the subject does not—and he is unwilling to give it up for anyone.
bram’s strength and unwavering conviction of self is one of the things i admire most about him. he grows without giving up the things that make him, him. it’s a quality i’d been searching for unknowingly for a long time before meeting bram—how could i leave behind my small town, my guilt stemming from my queerness and my two-year-long secret sapphic relationship, and still nurture the parts of myself that had taken shape and shaped me in turn during that time? the answer, it turned out, was everything bram embodies. in a substack post i wrote after we met, i said bram is “the fierce, the free, the fun” of te-whanganui-a-tara in a person. it’s true, and all this is so potent in ‘in every other universe’.
i lost the multiversal lottery
and so we talk about how you can’t talk to girlsmaybe in another universe you heel-turn
and learn to talk to boys instead
the fierce. the bite, like the little smirk at knowing this is actually something he would say to someone treating him in this way.
in another universe
i have a man who will look me in the eye
and fucks me good when i ask him nicely
the free. like starting university and turning eighteen and all of my poet-friends turning to each other and saying, can we write about sex now? and being too nervous to do it right, and worrying nana will read it, and and and . . . bram doesn’t limit or censor himself for anyone. it bites, too, it carries his spirit.
we could have our first kiss in a campus bathroom
tax-payer coat hook heavy with two bagsyou could eat honeydew candy on my floor
while i write you mediocre verse
about princesses taking knives to the chest
the fun. i’m not sure how to expand on this; bram is just exceptionally good at being light before he pulls you back down to reality with a line like “but that’s not how this works”. you get every ounce of this young-love-honeymoon-period in five lines and lose it in one. breathtaking (in the evil, wind-knocked-out-of-the-sails sense).
in his 2024 reflection, damien [bad apple‘s editor] wrote ‘in every other universe’ “hums with potential”, and looking back on this poem and this time in our lives, i can’t agree more. we were mere months into undergrad and adulthood and discovery and learning to grow into new versions of ourselves while respecting everyone we had been, and it was confusing, and it was new. but when i met bram, it was almost like seeing a mirror, or looking into the camera on instagram and thinking “shit, i look great” before realising the beauty filter is on—we were in similar places, but bram’s grace and poise in navigating the world (also reflected in his poetry!) had felt so unattainable to me for so long. but when i leant into my identity—all parts of it—and thought about what made me me like fierce/free/fun makes bram bram, it felt like coming home.
i like to think bram and i still hum with potential. for two summers now we’ve been writing essays together, and i cannot imagine a better creative partner. i’m always pushed to think in new ways, i often get that breathtaking sensation that i familiarised myself with by reading ‘in every other universe’ one trillion times, and whatever state of being (crazy/confused/crying/all three) we are in, there’s an understanding, a respect, and a call to be authentic in everything we do, because both together and independently, the last two years have taught us that, above anything else, we are enough. being ourselves is the only thing we have to do for people to see the potential in us, to make our poetry sing, to find friends and keep them forever.
bram and i wrote this poem about six months ago—it holds our past, present and future selves.
bram, this piece is for you—now, then, always—it’s for our universe. the real one i love you in and have loved you in and will love you in forever.
all my love,
ella.
te quiero comer
by bram casey and ella sage
catch no curse.
humid autumn and the sweat sticks,
eternal calm before the storm.
quick chat w/ the nerves in my wrist (hold fast while i finish
hold hands til we’re over)
bleeding hickeys and tank tops (almost aphrodisiac)
sunburn and seabirds (summer elegiac)
look up at you like you’re saving me (appreciate grandeur)
love balance
voicemail from your lover who is leaving you (summer elegiac)
balance hurts
(so now i walk around small, hot towns drinking overpriced orange juice)
he’s already hurting / articulation pressed to skin like glitter
split cells and sleep in his smell
all-time dopamine high (desire is in the details)
almost never felt real, but you’re my drug of choice now
many imitate none replicate (many imitate
none replicate).
ella sage and bram casey are nineteen and on fire, emotionally based in pōneke with roots in the south island. both have been published in bad apple and re-draft. bram’s work can also be found in overcom and salient, and ella’s in recent editions of canta.
