Lavender Shadow:
Fewer Rainbows
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Handmade Birds
Bonemeal for your bread
Keep these colors in your head
Get behind me, get under me
We're choking what's your ante?
Show me your teeth
I'll show you flesh
They'll kill me for this body anyway
Giant Wandering Tortoise/Lightning Urn
Listening to the rimegepant dissolve
on my tongue
Laying on my back
Watching the sunrise—
the kitchen light warm up
Slowly brighter
'til it engulfs me
I have no one to be
I have nothing to say
I have nothing to do
I have nowhere to run
Not that I'd go there anyways:
It's too late
I'm cornered
A prey animal
A resigned sigh
Finally something good is happening
Verdant Fangs
Eidolon baring her teeth at me
in the new mirror
feather sutured flesh
wings filling sky
our crooked grimace-grins aligned
skulls cracked diaphonous with
oneiric heat vomiting forth
we crumble
in imbricate embrace.
Steam in Sun
A walking wake
Garland of destruction threaded through my hair
Swelling uncomfortably
I'm bringing down the earth with me
Down, down, down
As far as I can go
Chatterbox Moth
Hair is growing from my mouth
My fingers are rebar forcing into and through tendon and bone
Eyes flammable, leaking kerosene and caffeine
Cornices on my shoulders dead weight
My bodice full of what should be there
My stomach is strangling a shooting star
The constellations groan in awe of me
I'm hungry
Alive and shimmering in horror
I'm screaming with longing
Hear me
Before my words turn to smoke
Against the Day
The shadows of all that you give me
The fires are burning slow
A body frail with lightning
Tottering
On legs that don't know where to go
Spit that can't be swallowed
Lodged in a closing throat
The mechanical bird swaying
Singing
Note after sterile note
—
The day's serrations
The day's soft hammer blows
on skull, on skull
The day's broken branches
shattering the glassy lake surface
Flagging health checkered 'til the end