I don’t want to spend the rest of my life running down steep palace steps with a swollen ankle bound in glass and a shoeless foot, throbbing vagina, my evening interrupted by strokes of a clock whose noise tears the world in two // No, I’m devastated to be running away from…

          A Thessalian king who chopped down the sacred grove of the goddess          Demeter (Ceres) in order to build himself a feast-hall. Theoi Greek Mythology                               1.A many-turreted tree, sacred to holy Ceres,twig-fingers webbed with new green,prayer flags attached. But he will have none of that. For lumber and his empire, it will be dispatched. “Foreman, henchmen,…

Rooted atop a grassless hill existsA leafless, barkless cemetery tree,Its branches twist like curling witch-fingersPainting long, creeping shadows, aliveWith a flickering spectral-glow of black-Opal’d witches’ dust—floating mists of ghost-light—Capturing cold and lifeless flames withinThe deepening darkness of impending midnight              As the shadows deepen, the tree-roots awaken,                           Enchanting the hill with illusions…

I was brought here as a clean prisoner, stone walls and a corset stealing breaths from my lungs,whalebone carving my waist, wilting my ribs. The stranger husband with foreign skin a scarier topography than the new land our manor was rooted in. My arrival brought downcast eyes and the vigorous scrubbing of her portrait every…

Is that a strand of gray you see?      What does the mirror say, if not that you are  not what you seem to be, not what      you think? You are vapor poured into a vase, delivered      in smoke and sharp angles, a wolf  in bear’s skin, howling and hairy      sharp-mouthed, tongue-tied to another face…