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

Breathing Sky

My bones crack as I shed my skin
Again and again and again

I’m twisting and reaching
Writhing and moaning

My grief waning like the grinning moon 
Peeking out through winter mists

Ice clouds shrieking through my torso
Dragging old pain across the night sky

To be dissolved in ephemeral clouds that tremor away in fits
My stars align in lunar flight

Purifying my heart with these crystals of gods’ tears
I am alive and breathing sky

August Lilies

Here lilies lick the growing moon.
The moon, he kisses back.
They're opening,
unwavering.
Communing with the shining king.

The scent of them,
unpuckering.
Their petals sweet,
unfolding.

Tilted back
to feel his lips
brushed upon their gentle tips,
the perfumed drafts of supple forms
dancing in the balmy dark
beckon to his majesty,
call him from his slumbering.

And he is calling back to them,
the stars around rejoicing.
This ecstasy between them
shines to the one in awe,
fills the gentle August air 
with trembling passionate spice
that only lasts for a few warm nights
before they lie dormant again. 

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.

Bloodroot

Pulling red beets from black soil
Aggregate minerals tumbling down
On my knees in the sanctuary
Patella bones cradled by earth

Fertilized to crimson
To blood-red and black
Sweet-hearts-shaped and beating
With the sky a shade of dusk

To pull them right
Balsamic moon holding
In the open of my hands
Juice-trickle so like blood

Sacrificial bulbous
Root to spinous process
Bending every fiber
Of these aching limbs too real

Shifting

I.
Oaken mold of trees
Blood to rotting roots 
Baying on the ridgeline
She-wolf hides her skins

Skulking peeking cautious
Takes on human form
Changes with the moon
Seeking fresher carcass

II.
Bred into the soil
And bones bereaved of love
A skeleton of winter
And icicle drips

Lofty slopes
Her lair is dug 
Where trembling saplings
Plead for sun

Darkness here
This Stygian wild
Fed from grief
And the trickling springs

III.
Weress woman
Hides her skins 
The deepest trunk
Of the eldest tree

She dons them again
On New Moon
Just reclaimed 
From balsamic

And so the cycle 
Meager existence
Mountain heart
Crevasse bound

Serpents Delve

I build things and then destroy them
There are no endings
Only a serpent spinning

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel
I can not
Will not 
Long for it
Darkness encircles me
Darkness is me

Melting into a cave of quiet
My slick limbs smeared onto walls of stone
This heart beats toward the slithering gold
That pulls and taunts me toward its luster 

Unrequited

This small and unrequited love

Frail and screeching like a newborn

Bleating shakily in thorny corners

Of the overgrown brambles of passion

I am left alone to care for

To find and hold and nurture

Unless I put it out of its misery

And bury its corpse in the earth

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.

Coiled

Love decayed
Our clotted blood
Drake skin
On drooping boughs

Darkness Climbing
Crawling
Dreaming

Darkness Falling
Crying
Dreaming

All rotting flesh
Is soaked into the
Black
And teeming earth
Joyous in decay
Feeding on itself

Writhing life
And death alike

Your hungry arms
Two gleaming sides
of the serpent
Which consumes me
The coil
That consumes me

Writhing life
And death alike

So we descend
Into the earth
The dank abyss
Consumes us
Arms encoiled
Consumes us

Writhing life
And death alike