hedera

I’m a tiny child in a tiny town.
My soles flatten grass and straw
Sharp enough to leave lines on my skin.
Wide eyes drink at the red on the floor;
Red like soup, something I could drink in the winter.
Soaking into the gaps of the tiles.
Arms like birch trees hauling sticks to the fire,
Peeling off my own skin and swapping it for shiny rocks to put in a circle.
The women around me understand.
They teach me to listen to the crows and run from the light.

I’m a girl of the ice,
Building friends out of the leftover leaves in the teapot,
Dressing them with berries.
I teach them how to sing but I cannot speak.
I take the dolls everywhere.
I learn to wash the plants alone and place them where the feeling takes me,
I wander in the forest and wear the skin of the ones before me to keep me safe.
My grandmother tells me it is always like this.
You hide and sleep and serve
You wait till the calling.

The autumn brings changes.
My arms grow into strong oak,
Coffee stains bleed out from my eyes and turn to coal
My hair hisses into wilderness and I begin to see more than I could before
I kill sheep for the winter.
I eat them alive
Paint the walls lightly with their remains.
Across the moors the women watch me and smile at their fireplaces,
Crackling more than the wood they burn.
They burn me too.
We are, they tell me, a family
And finally I am allowed to breathe

I’m a woman now, so they say.
In love with the shadows
Bathing in starlight and the heart of this world knows me more than any man.
I have never seen a man.
The fires in this old cottage are mine now and the women still smile at me
Dirty venom in their eyes
The years finally tearing into the skin on their faces.
I see my own cheeks bloom,
My whole body an ancient incantation.
I feel it when I’m alone, lightning in the crevices of my brain
Copper in my veins
My heart beats for nobody.
I breathe for no one.

When the time came I poured the last of the summer wine onto the stone floor
I left glass raindrops on the counter
Grew thorns in my carnations.
The door is open and the leaves are already blowing into my front room
Burning into the furniture, becoming ashes in the pages of the old texts
Ready to be rewritten for the next lonely child in the next godforsaken town.
The cycle means nothing.
I should have had a voice from the moment I was born.

Into the forest, out onto the hill
The calling takes me past the mountains of my childhood and into the silence of the unknown
I’m following them, hardened skin pressed against briar
They take the crown of thorns from my fingertips.
The spectre pins me down and I watch as my tiny town bursts into eternal flames
There’s fire
There’s fire
There’s fire and the women are gone, the chain is gone, but we are still here.

Somewhere past nowhere.
Forever passes nowhere.

For one hundred years it burns and eventually it is just me
Me, and the soul, white as milk, smooth as the skulls of the birds in my garden
It breathed into me and unlocked a voice held for so long that it was barely a whisper.
But it grew.
We grew.

They are with me still.

[Image: black and white roses. Source: Dani Relbyn. Used with permission.]