(i) nocturne
venus spins her threads, halves dealt to strangers each night a tender harvest the moon her church columned in wintered vines, white eyes cut from cloth, one- winged moths; the body is a different kind of arsonist how willingly it gives itself to covens of moonflowers & prays as moths do for perennial, earthly heat such as hands to pattern the lucid air of mine; I slip into a forest of blood moons – of love & other hallucinations, heralded by an aching chest & bellied fireweed – to learn the braille of another because who are you & I if not made for consumption a single fire the softest violence (ii) diurne venus lays her claim in mourning, embers sputtered in the onslaught of dawn; the nightmare is in the waking my body an urn littered with apertures of unfelt things; trees crowd the light & half-beat insects, dead- fall along the forest bed, parched & absent from my fingertips – I mold their corpses into wishbone: two souls chained & baptized in the same river, more ravenous than the dream, to be solidified into something whole – fervent & real. |
© 2022 Tatiana Clark