my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
It is scary to her, too, but not in the same way and not for the same reasons.
There is nowhere to hide. As a girl, this forest was easy to tuck herself into. She could wriggle behind hawthorns and wild roses and watch the dust motes dance in rays of warm, gold sun as she waited for her friends to seek her out. She could lay flat on her side, suck all the air deep into her lungs to flatten out her belly and bury herself under thick, autumnal detritus—fallen leaves, all orange and yellow, and dropped, half-wilted flowers, leaving her coat thick with grime when finally she reemerged. But she is not a girl anymore. She knows this because every morning she checks the knobs of her knees, the lengths of her legs and her height against all the places she onced played. She is big (as her father had been before her, though while he filled every inch of his body, she seems to sink into hers); she is long-legged, but proportioned.
Womanly, now, despite everything.
She has grown up, though that process seems to have passed her by.
(Time is strange and stranger still.
Time is, above all, unstoppable.)
Even as a girl, it was hard to hide in winter. Is it bleak, quiet, hollowed-out—bereft of birdsong and leaf-languages; she stands behind the broad, perseverant body of a deep green pine tree, peeking from behind its spiky, unkind fingers. (But if she can smell it, it can smell her.) She blinks, tears slipping down her pale, lavender cheekbones. (If she can see it, it can see her.) She breaths out, dragging raggedly past her quivering lips.
But it does not scare her because it could wrap its cruel, toothy jaws around her throat with ease.
It does not scare her because it could hunt her down like a dog does a rabbit.
It scares her because she does not know from where it came.
She does not know if it is real.
She does not know if it is escaped.
“H-hello?” she calls, still buried in the arms of an evergreen. When the sounds lifts from her mouth, white and vaporous, she cringes back, muscles seizing like pinched up springs. Still and silent, she can only wait. Wait, of course, for it to answer her back in a tongue she does not understand—like one of the many she had heard in mother’s creation, a cacophony of despair as their world was rent apart, or with a voice like a string symphony—so that she can pass it by like that many walking escapees that already crowd her periphery.
(Bejeweled tigers, pastel-colored bears;
Manticores and shellycoats.)
and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.