Survival

Bare feet cold and cramped
Feeling trapped so I cut it loose
That’s just what I do when trapped
Burn the rope that binds 
Myself from my Faery self
Freeze the hand that tames 

My shape is wild
And Unseen
For you don’t see the bleeding heart that needs a gentle hush
Tender hands and careful words
She's invisible to you
This spontaneous creek loving girl 

All you see is the object of your lust
Undressed and hopping into water 
Snowmelt pulsing
Valley soil eyes
Flesh-gleam tight with cold
Curves like winding streams

And there truly is no love in how 
I was taken quickly against the trunk
Fae joy fading into gelid moss
As my heart congealed again
Into this human woman
Living in Survival

Cranberry Columbine Creek

It’s like the 
damp littered forest is 
obfuscating my senses.
The way it smells,
the way you smell, 
running heartily down the mountain.
Catch me!
Catch up to me! 
Cranberry columbine creek.

To the boughing trees where I sink:
The summer sun 
is lemonade 
fade 
through branches cool and long.
The dawn and then 
the dusk. 
East to west.
Colors falling 
downward 
in the glass;
sweetened syrup.

And I’m a wet mess 
river swamp thing; algae:
Salmon skin 
shining in the 
confluence 
of tributary 
creek to river,
river to sea.

I left you in the dust of basalt 
but we were already breaking; 
the summer sun 
iced lemonade,
cold beer, warm wine, 
and water-blood. 
The words we loved. 
We drank so much we consumed each other!
We carved our names into sandstone 
as if they would stay,
as if I would stay.

Bardess.
Seeker.
Poetess. 
Seeker.

In the trees elf-disc comes through in
grenadine.
I can’t stop facing 
cranberry colored,
crimson-basted 
lemonade-draining creek.
Cranberry. Columbine. Creek.

Beloved, you died in those sugary woods. 
My heart, your heart;
the same creature beating. 
Wrapped in fat, 
dripping dark black
blood in a trap 
dangled from doorway.
Cranberry columbine creek.

I wanted to write,
but you hung your heart in the trap 
and had it bleed before me, 
as if me writing would destroy us.
Somehow you knew 
if I was given the space to write,
I would leave.
Leave!
Inevitable that I leave.

Destroyer.
Seeker.
Traveler.
Seeker.

Mountains high and glossed.
Lemons squeezed and tossed, 
tossed then found,
lost, and bound 
to standing rocks 
beside the stream 
looking down, 
not behind,
but down.
At
cranberry columbine creek.

Shush, child.

It is a voice rising, shushing, rushing, looming: a sixth sense of memory.

Sick, what I knew inside: the lights just dim enough to see but not See.

Living forever in the moment of dusk’s aborted night.

It’s how I see you now: gloating, glowing, smirking, screaming, floating on your maddened cloud-throne.

The usurper, borne from hell, risen, and elated.

Peace out of reach.

The palette of reality grappled from beneath.

An old-found fear that you return as a ghost, some jaunting, creaking, moaning, luminescent thing.

Hugging me cold.

Graveyard dreams I wield and tend in the uniform of haunts.

Unadorned. Vehement towards love.

Numb.

To feel then, it would all end! Be burned into the sky again; it’s upside down in my head right now.

We stayed together in a rusting circle, entwined, limbs wriggling, trapped but loving it.

Ignorant.

No, I had to end it with your squirming, engorged self-worth like a massive vigil to my failing soul; crushed, interred deep in the worst bent position to die in.

Limbs creak.

Femur dregs.

And when I pull the blankets close and try to find some bit of quiet, I am sold again into the false.

Comfort, ha.

A foreign one.

As an heiress to buried pain, words fumble raggedly, and stumble through this.

Years of shame, grief, disbelief.

Push it down. Pushed down.

Down.

Forced to digest.

Royally crowned in a circlet of claws, forged from the fires of an enslaved love.

Descending into soil, descending into clay, dissolving into bedrock, yet still my pain will stay.