Well read and well spoken, this is the blood on the pages, cold breezes, oceans, pebble beaches and black sand.
Sleeping in the darkness of pine forests forgotten by the masses. Taste of iron and rose petals. The barn owl perched,
watching stumbling lost twigs and needles tangled in soft brown curls. Dancing in the sparks between flames at midnight.
Find your home, child, with the lost and the angry. Make your offering at the altar of antlers and ash. Wear your dress of webs and silk, burn your history to see the future.
Open all of your windows so the stars can swoop in as they please.
Kick off your blankets and let the forests into your sheets. Dark skies pressing in, come a little closer and I’ll whisper nightsounds over your skin.
Don’t spend the silver dollars in your pocket, you'll need them for later,
for luck,
for lunar eclipses over whispering bows, telling the stories written in tea leaves carelessly spilled from bone china cups. Tales only exchanged for silver moonlit eyes and promises of lakes filled with mysteries and rusted old swords.
There are stories I still tell myself, whispered words of a hero's journeys, walking the path we have walked for four thousand years,
steps tread again and again and again,
finding love, losing love, finding purpose and strength within myself, without anyone else.
It doesn't feel very heroic.
I don't feel like a hero. This life feels like a strange collection of stories on a theme.
Finding love, losing love, picking flowers, following trails deeper into forests of pine.
Warm honey spills over spoons and slides slowly down your thighs, thoughtless sweetness poured like libations--milk and memories of sleepless nights,
a prayer that was answered, but not how you wanted. Be careful what you wish for, dear, with your milk and honey praying for connection, answered by the endless sigh of the wind over bones.
This is a dangerous place to be with your teacups and curls.
How did you find your way here, child? These woods aren't kind to softness and lace, to hands uncalloused and sticky with sap.
Listen to the sighs of limb and bark teaching about the wild places, barren hilltops that moan low and lonely to an indifferent sky, speaking to silence and asking for nothing in return.
Leave all your windows open and let the forests blow in through white sheer curtains,
half moons and silver dollars spilling over satin sheets raining down like starlight,
owl feathers and paperback novels of lovers lost
stained with tea,
with mud, with blood,
with the memories of our own desire to be touched, my desire to have lashes like cobwebs brushed slowly over my skin like an empty house.
All shall be revealed at the price of one silver dollar promising liberty, promising justice.
There is a price to be paid when you let the wild into your bed.
____________________________
First published in Compass Rose Literary (West issue) 2024