Concora

Dawn breaks soft, You are sun glare in the rearview; and I, the heavy mist ahead on a road that forgets to end.

Love is not a raised fist.

1 Church spire, stretching, weds the moon. 2 Slate sky and a heavy heat; collapsing. 3 Embroidered stars— celestial needlework. 4 Fairy wrens: steeds of elven knights, armoured all in blue. 5 Raindrops— wet wings, startled honeybee. 6 Huntsman upon orange glass: a specimen, fossilised in amber. 7 Scarred grape, veined in gold— kintsugi. 8 White blossoms, fallen like snowdrops. 9 Eagle in flight, great wings cradling the half-moon. 10 Pastel sun, peeking from a soft, smoky grey duvet. 11 The world settles; the heavens awaken— storm. 12 Black swans: two arrows in tandem. 13 Mirror-verse— sunset’

The world unfurls: becomes a gemstone, sinking a mirror breaking a thousand splintering realities and I am lost — forgotten who I ever was, forgotten how to breathe.

Crowning glory aflame, a golden Queen surveys Jeweled ladies revel in the coming of night.

The storm throws you to my door, drenched and bloodied, god-light dimmed. The crest of the hill is underwater. You have no boots.          Morning dawns cold, clear, a watery gold. You are gone.

A beckoning: watercolour sky shrinking, too late, teeth fall; pearls from a broken string. Blink and the moon ignites— but the sheets are still envelope-stiff.

In a land of dreams and dust: the curve of a half-hazed sun, devoured.

Scorpio's tail slips low— a mari usque ad mare: from sea to sea over me, a devil in the sky above; and the Huntress peels dawn like an orange. (Fling me amongst the stars: the Mad Queen's cosmic mirage.)

The Hunter          Orion's prey—          a sky of fleeing stars:          dawn. Chiron          Sagittarius:          the archer's arrow,          piercing eventide.

I have been one acquainted with the night, and that has made all the difference. one aged man--one man--can't keep a house, but I am done with apple-picking now, and miles to go before I sleep, so now and never any different. "you'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen, like two kinds of jewels, a vision for thieves-" can't a man speak of his own child he's lost? like pearls, and now a silver blade, and dead wings carried like a paper kite, nothing gold can stay. something there is that doesn't love a wall; truth? a pebble of quartz? for once, then, something. the clever eyes of my wandering child, heart not averse to being b

My grandmother fell in love with my grandfather when his skin was still yellow with malaria. At twenty-four, he had just returned from war, his pockets heavy as his heart, weighed down with souvenir scars and unspent bullets. Gaping trenches hung beneath each of his dark eyes like open, sore wounds, or sorer memories. At nineteen, she had not known the taste of oranges. The first time she held one, she bit straight into the pasty skin, expecting sweetness and coming up with shell-fragments. In the pictures, my grandmother, radiant in her gray wedding dress, stands before my grandfather. Those trenches are still there, still yawning beneath

shanghai child [29/08/13] you take a bike and rust it with raindrops and humid summer mist, and give it scars that tell memories of reckless crashes and bike rack disasters and dark windy nights pedaling above the lights of the city,& you take a child- frayed at the edges, forest-born and you give her a book of numbers which she must memorize—if she is to be anything. let her sing, a poor bird lost in paradise. you take a soul and slip it into a body too small to contain it; watch the way her eyes shine& you'll know it wants to escape. maybe you'll see her twirling in the yellow spotlight as even the streets grow quiet to watch her. s

Fey They were always dancing, just beyond her reach.  As a child, she had never been quite tall enough to grab for them, and as she grew, they must have grown, too.  No one else seemed to see them, and no one humored her passionate pursuit, especially not as she passed through her teenage years and on into adulthood.  Her parents had worried over her constantly and had frequent conversations with her, urging her to put childhood aside and focus on what was real. Those talks ceased as she simply stopped talking about them to her parents.  They didn't believe, and never had (though she hadn't realized it).  To her friends, she was the dreamer