anxious to please and
breathless from the spinning of her world she stands there,
crackling with the anger of a thousand licking flames
desperate for approval, or anger, or both, any
emotional reaction would do –
for how could anyone know how it felt, truly, to be her,
gravel in her mouth and water in her lungs, she was
hoping that it would be better by now, or at least not worse, an
iridescent ache everywhere she looked, and
justice seemingly bent on evasion, the glimmer of her
knight in shining armor on close inspection turning out to be her own reflection,
licking her wounds with a salty tongue –
moons of darkness passing overhead in only one
night,
opaque dreams floating up from her scalp towards a
pious Mary slouching towards assumption day, a dogma in-the-making
quenching her thirst with saltwater
rearing a child
she never asked for,
tipsy with her love for him nonetheless, a
usurper, taking up the space that had once been reserved for herself only
vying for attention
while she’s busy holding up the sky and her
xeric eyes have lost sight of what it was to be
young and eating cherries in her mother’s garden, sucking the
zest from the dandelion stems