Let there be light in my entropic heart
and launch me to escape velocity.
Lift me from this binding well

where steel sharpens bone
and guillotines are chandeliers.

Take me where angel wings are comet tails
and demons don’t exist.

I wish to drown in ultraviolet;
baptized in purest newborn stars.

Blind me but for infrared
to see the birth of God.

Cradle me in emptiest embrace;
an accretion of my hopes.

The constants here make sense to me,
the charm, the dark, the strange.

My muscles are my manacles;
I am only human with them off.
Release me, if only for tonight.

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I went for a walk on harsh winter evening.

The mid-season snowflakes were wide as eyes,

beaming at the furnace dressed in black.

My breath the stage for snowflakes’ dance,

they pranced until my coat turned white.

Just past the edge of streetlight’s reach,

groaned a breeze hollow and bleak –

a cutting howl thought almost speech, or even query.

“Have you come to join me?”

My outreached hand a gentle please.

The mind seeks company,

even in lonesome reprieve. 

Perhaps it was a moose, the bears should be asleep.

With heed well-taken my mind could wander more.

I marched again the darkened breach,

cold playfully snapping at my heels

and tapping on my nose.

I missed the nights of wildfire green

painted in streaks across the sky,

but settled for the frostbit air

pinching at my cheeks and tugging at my clothes.

Until beside me walked a figure.

Stalking, baulking at my brooding form.

An absence in periphery,

a gap among the snow.

Mockingly, I asked,

“Are you some ghost born of my past,

come to teach a moral that I lack?”

No answer came, no sounds were made,

save those hollow groans, persisting of the wind.

The figure’s gaze it did not shift.

Blizzard spun around the shape, apprising of its space.

Awkwardly I raised my pace.

Around a corner, it gave chase.

“What do you want, an apology?”

Which haunting wrong should I make right?

Cold no longer nipping at my feet,

but biting sharp with many teeth.

A numbing, angry, heat. A malice marrow deep.

I must move forward, can’t turn back.

Is that the lesson that I lack?

Another turn, I thought it lost.

Though winter’s scorn does not know brevity.

My gait cut trenches in the snow,

which piled higher as I slowed.

Toes too cold to recognize severity.

No windows lit, no witnesses.

Before me it was stood.

The chilling void

where winter should have been.

“You are not real,” ghostly foe.

This woe is my own reverie,

this pain is mine to feel.

With shoulders back and level chin,

I stayed on track and met the devil.

Snowflakes kept their distance, as they danced

around the figure dressed in black;

stood chimney tall with steaming breath

and spreading winter grin.

A furnace lit with newfound yearning.

A pointed torch on midnight journey.

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You give my name meaning. I give you the world.

I am the forest. Your cities sleep in me.

I know you once loved me

as much as I love you.

My lungs are the changes in air pressure

that pull winds along the southeast channels.

My voice is carried to you

on the lips of swaying tree limbs.

You feel my gaze on the back of your skull

and on the bumps of your skin;

my eyes are the ravens.

When you lace up your boots

and zip up your jacket,

you don childhood armor, my love.

My teeth are what grind the glaciers into silt,

make waters impossible to tread

and drag kayaks to the riverbed.

I smother the stars with gossamer and spite.

In winter, I choke mountains with my spinnerets.

What you call autumn, I call evening.

I rot the leaves so that my trees may rest.

Every spring I say hello to you with flowers.

I sing to you with showers,

though you do not know that it’s for you.

You cannot even hear my lonely drops of rain.

So I belt my love for you.

My sky holds many clouds

and their coats hold many knives.

Gathered under rainstorm,

I know you hear my lullabies.

I watched you crawl when you were small.

I watched you cry when you thought you were alone;

I decorated your shoulders with pine needles as I joined.

I give you the world, but only for a while.

I can’t wait to feel your ashes on my skin

and give you kisses once again.

read issue #37

First fell the angels.
Second fell their father.

We are left holding the sword.
When demons grow their sharpest teeth,

the laundry weighs its heaviest
and armor lighter than a smile.

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