#12 or, “And This Bird You Cannot Change”

My last day as a teacher / I saw a baby bird in the road /

mistook it for my students

Eyes wide shut as all innocence is 

Barely enough feathers to keep warm let alone take flight 

7 mins to catch my bus / indescribable weight burdening my brow 

/ I ask myself how much life is worth /

A mother with her baby in a black carriage /

Her scowl a mirror of our encumbrance  

The only cloth I have to carry the bird / a black mask 

Fleshy thing / yet he’s got little meat and soft bones 

Two infants, swathed in black, my brown body between them

7 mins to a lifetime 

/ I decide that bird years and human years aren’t so different /

A wounded heart can make you play God /

I learned today 

Cradling life and death gently in cupped hands

Purpose a mere bus ride away 

Leave him in a park at the base of a tree / mistaking him for my student 

My black mask wasn’t the only thing I left with him 

/ I wonder if my father dropped me flying the nest /

Another baby bird died the day I decided to leave home / loud herald in his little voice

Same town, different road 

I knew I wasn’t his teacher

Yet I picked up the weight just the same 

As I did, a black woman driving a short school bus looked on at me in horror / 

if only he’d been a child, maybe she’d have offered him a ride 

A white bag between his little body and the veins in my palm 

/ I stared down my death in the road, and I offered him safe passage /

This time I remembered the animal hospital / on a corner I frequently passed but rarely saw

Told me they didn’t treat birds 

Looked at everything but the life in my hands 

Felt just like my mother’s gaze 

I had no home to bring him to / left him under a redbud tree 

/ We both know what it means to be strange fruit /

Prayed for his passing / he gave me hives, still I cried to put him down 

/ I packed my bags and told my mother I was leaving that night / 

A month since I flew the coop / all the birds I see are grown now 

Soaring in the sky / I don’t know these roads / all the birds I see are grown now 

Skin on my hands and feet peeled heavily / making room for my new self 

I suppose I was growing the feathers those babies never got to 

A week before fall / I’m walking on uncharted pavements

I don’t look back

/ Knowing I left the old me at the base of some trees /

#6, or “I May Think of You Softly From Time to Time, But I’ll Cut Off My Hand Before I Ever Reach For You Again”

She littered on my spirit like my being was her least favorite neighbor’s garden

Her lipstick, wine red and matte, an imprint on my reflection

Cracked glass and teeth scraping, how her kiss bit back

Baby was all sharp edges and I was but a child who never learned not to run with scissors

Grim smiles, cold hands intertwined

Didn’t care where she ended and I began

Unzipped my skin to get her warm

I used to love it when she was here, she kept me vigilant 

My own personal heroin(e)

All up in my veins, varicose love song

She sang me home on starless nights in foggy waters

Home

Where my heart resided between clenched fist and crossed fingers

Behind my back, hoped to die, I swear I fought tooth and nail

Little did I know, she swung her tenderness like a hammer

There I was, hung up all good and straight

And wasn’t I just the prettiest thing in her display 

She taught me that lips can dissect with the precision of a knife 

Ever since that first time, I’ve thought I glowed better under tight lids

You see, she always made sure she’d poke me some holes so I could breath 

So you can imagine that the day she disappeared was the day my Earth stood still 

Was all lackluster moon, no sun in my wings to make me shine 

All black space, no orbit 

Could not get that damned lid off the jar

Light flickering, tinkering out, I did not believe in fairies anymore

But I missed her 

Like an animal free of a trap after gnawing off their own leg, I missed her 

Left my blood trailing so she could follow it, she always said I smelled good

I waited, and waited and waited 

Made a sentry out of me with all that time 

But she never returned, got not so much as a postcard or a voicemail

Nothing in this world is louder than a silence you did not ask for 

Suddenly rainfall on my window sounded like the devil mocking my pain

I was left alone in the exhibit she had made of me with only myself to blame

Maddeningly, still I longed for her all the same 

Remembered my teachers telling us how sometimes house slaves grew comfortable in confinement

She’d given me a silver choker that I wore nearly every day in her absence 

Have you ever been trained so well, you put the chains on yourself?

She was always there, always there, always there 

In the back of my mind, on the tip of my tongue, the corner of my eye

I picked up the phone and put down myself 

She answered with feint traces of laughter on the second ring 

Unbothered, patient, silver is good enough for you, isn’t it

Silver, as if we all don’t see it and think that gold shines better 

I ripped that choker from my throat so quickly it gave me whiplash

Better my hand than hers, but still it stung, and burned, and scorched, and bled

I murdered that ravenous thing she left inside me in cold, scarlet blood 

Smothered it bare, staunched the wound 

Buried it in my backyard with bitter tears and hollow laughter

Thinking of the first time we met

I was reading ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’

She told me then that I seemed more like ‘A Mortician’s Daughter’

Now, every once in a while 

On blustery nights and blue moons

There’s a ghost in my window 

#11, or “His Love is Like a Whisper”

You ask me not to silence my passion, all the while dousing your flames in tepid waters

I wonder if you know that I have been burned

That the material of our scars are tougher than unmarred flesh 

That even suffering can be graceful if you don’t do it alone 

But you’ve been on your own for so long

The real kind, where your solace, Messiah and helping hand are all one with the man in the mirror 

I surmise this is why your love is like a whisper; soft, and leaves me tingling down to my toes, but quiet 

Very quiet

Almost as if you’re afraid to make a home in me 

Like you would struggle for warmth in a cold storm just to keep my embers warm 

Not knowing that I am solar flare given form 

That I was a storm chaser before I knew the difference between snow and hail and lightning and thunder 

That freezing hearts shrink away from me with snarl and hiss because they know I will melt them down to their barest puddles of unresolved traumas and lies we tell ourselves to keep going 

Beautiful boy, I ask if you know that I truly see you 

And that these eyes are not cages or pointed fingers looking to make you hero nor villain of this story 

Only to let you know that I have also been that small child with a voice drowned out by voices that like to make their nothing sound like everything 

To let you know that you were never supposed to be told to bottle it up, keep it in, stop crying, lock it away 

To tell you that our pasts may be written in stone, but we can lay down our uncertainties like cement on a new sidewalk

And tread on them until we are a beaten path that you know like the back of your hand 

Know that I would want to hear your voice and words every day if I didn’t think it would scare you 

And that I sit with baited breath and coiled stomach pondering how much is “too much” all the time 

That I am still afraid you will think my askance of you, sacrificial 

That no matter how brightly our love shines, you will never let it lead you home

Coming Soon, From the ‘Etherterrea’ Series …

Branches whip at my face in unforgiving lashes as I speed through the brush with all my might, darkness and shadow nipping ever closer at my heels. The festering marshland beyond Valtallon was unsanctioned land, the forest at the edge of it even more precarious still; none are permitted beyond the borders for weariness of the dangers beyond. None, that is, except those of the royal bloodline. And even then, it was still a foolish errand. Bitter, vengeful souls ravage the land, creatures born of hate and spite and war. Some of them were once Etherians or Evariants, changed by time, hardship and battle. Others, though … well, not even the royal bloodline has knowledge of what exactly those others are. All that is known of them is that they aren’t people, nor animals … something in between, or perhaps neither. I can hear the erratic breath of one of them behind me, snarling fiendishly as it chases closer and closer.

My legs burn from thigh to ankle with exertion, yet I barely feel them moving as my heart races even faster in my chest. It’s so dark here; a pitch blackness that pulses with death, swirling before the naked eye in unnatural patterns, whining out eerie, croaked moans. There are things, alive things indecipherable in so much darkness, watching me, clawing at me. Not that I can see them—no, I feel them, the ghost of their chilling breath on the back of my neck, tussling through my hair. I can’t make out the trees or bushes, only feel the sting of them upon my cheeks as I rush past.

It’s that feeling you get when you stare into an open black space for too long, the feeling that you’re being hunted by that blackness, that it encroaches upon you the longer you stare—except it was real.

It was all real, with a mindless lividity that hungers for everything in its path.

The creature’s footsteps pound the moist terrain closer and closer behind me, every sludgy splash making my blood rush louder in my ears. The closer it gets, the more chaotic its steps; one second they sound like heavy paws trekking through mud, and the next it’s a wretched dragging, scraping noise.

My breath seizes in my lungs. I am going to die. This is going to be my end.

I’ll be torn to pieces and swallowed up by whatever that thing is, or worse yet, I’ll become one of them, doomed to wander and toil for an eternity, all because I wanted to escaped another lecture. I’d had enough of it; the disdain, the belittling, the endless comparisons to my all too perfect sister. Now, though, a hair’s breadth away from death on ill-begotten land, I wish I was facing something as simple and tedious as a lecture.

The fates are cruel.

Considering my life up until this point, I should’ve realized it by now. I should have known that nothing good would come of running, just as nothing good has ever come from staying. Not for the first time, but perhaps the last, I curse the weak magic flowing through my veins that renders me so helpless. The Sun can’t be called upon here in Abyssian lands, not with the sky blotted out in darkness the way it is. Even if it could, I’m not strong enough to wield it as my ally the way other Sunseeded do. The way my mother, father and sister can.

 I can’t skin change, can’t take flight.

I can’t even command the flames of our ancestors. Sunbane, I hear my sister sneer in that cold, haughty tone she always does. I am weak, flameless, and I am going to die for it.

A wave of frost sweeps over me and through me, turning my blood to ice. The force throws me onto my back, thrashing wildly as what feels like the embodiment of death itself bares down upon me with all of its weight. The ground oozes sickly wet, festering with stench as marshlands do—just as grim as and cloying as the creature above me. It soils my fine clothes, muddying my long braids with filth and grime. Death has black jaws, a gaping maw of obsidian teeth, sharp as razors, dripping with shadows and blood like saliva. Death does not roar—it growls with a venomous snarl, low baritone vibrating through my chest to rumble the earth beneath my back. My breath stutters out of me in visible puffs in the cold, the very cries leaving my lips freezing in the stale air between death and I. My limbs go limp, from chill or fear I don’t know, and a savage bite tears into the flesh of my ribs. When I scream, the sound comes from the creature’s mouth instead of my own, as if it eats not only skin and bone, but the soul itself. A horrid squelching noise covers my torso as it drinks steadily from me; I can’t see it clearly even as I know it’s rights before my eyes, a congealing black mass of limb and teeth and shadow. I feel the life slipping out of me with every disgusting mouthful it takes, the parts of my body that it touches burning and freezing all at once.

 Sunbane.

It was only right that I would die in the deep shadows of Abyssian land. Still, my heart aches for the life I could have had if only I were better. Stronger. My eyes begin to flutter closed.