“I scheme a lot,
I know,
I plot and plan:
that’s how a queen in prison
spends her time.
But there is more to me than that.”
–A Lion In Winter

 

I want it back as good
as you get it.

I’m a queen wrapping her
linens in deity and
dreaming.
You are the stark silhouette
of a man on fire
stalking the world’s line
in an effort to destroy everything
that is naturally gold
or naturally divine.

I’m practicing brevity.
You are a friendly snake in my moss:
wraithlike and weaving,
delivering me whole orchards,
watching me devour the cores.
You’re black like me.
You waft wide away when you ignite:
spectral smoke that shifts into bored fingers
choking the equator’s throat
to have a good time.

I emasculate.
You invite.
Remind you,
I have no true armor or fists
to fight this,
I am no knight.
I’m a spell;
a woman of deific heritage who felt like a pot
boiling over and needed to
cool off for awhile,
remembered to kneel and wash my face,
drink the bubbling creek of my
cool, blue heart:
a cathedral door standing frozen,
and slightly ajar.

I’m carnivorous but sick of the mess
so I become a melting ice cap
that will soon rise to run
and ruin everything she rushes.
You are impossible to hold on to
but I chase to soothe
like ice water on the last day of June
when school is long out and the high noon beams
are shining on every slide on the block
and the toes are branded pink,
and I want you to swallow me in one sip,
gag      spit me out in the dirt
and lick me back up slowly
from this burning Earth
while I watch.

I’m entitled to this.
The day the world runs red with horizon
and I emerge:
my hubris residing in my tongue
demanding you guess my name,
gelid and expecting it.
Hear my chest creak in
anticipation, the stained glass shakes;
this great glacial organ that should give life,
but found in ire she is blindingly white,
binding, arctic and unmoved so
she just envelops everything she can
to preserve and study
and surmise she was right.

I’m hugging you tightly.
Your mouth is one giant O:
sapphire and stiff and  trying to scream
and your two lips will never meet mine,
will never meet again.
In this place you will stay stationary
without a breath to blow
or a vein to bleed
or a vocal cord to tell me to stop or leave
and your confusion warms
these blizzard fits.
You want to tell me some final thing.
What left do you have
that I couldn’t conjecture myself?
I’ve heard it.
I’ve lived through this.

The words eternally yours
are most often cried throughout
hell, and I have spent many nights
covering my ears with pillows
and other ideas about
twins and pockets of
“well, it always starts in winter”.

“horizon”