The forest is sick in a way that is difficult to parse; it is the same but it is not. The sun is at an angle it has never been before and the trees that were once trees are not anymore, and perhaps they never were. It is like walking in a dream and the Sentinel is asleep.
There are girls in the forest, feet bare on the moss and solstice cool on their tongues. The veil grows thinner here, the two forests reaching for one another, trees interlocking branches, sisters, trimmed in fairy lights and flower crowns. There are girls in the forest, but they are not girls, they are women set free from expectation. They will remember soft white dresses brushing knees and hair braided with fireflies with the sweetness of a dream.
I remember this novel idea, and I remember that I loved it - both the 2019 poems and the little bits of novel that you shared.
It's really interesting having the 2020 and 2019 poems side by side! I think both sets are great, though different: for example, the sun: the 2020 version paints a more explicit picture, which feels quite bittersweet, a mix of regrets and making peace; the 2019 version is a lot simpler, (and about the other character, I think?) but in that simplicity really packs a punch.
I looove the slightly uncanny scene in the 2020 the moon - the lines about the sun and the trees does some very cool stuff illustrating what is by describing what it's not, and there's a little bit of internal rhyme in there which kind of subtly ties the sun and the trees together in their uncanniness.
"The fact is, I don't know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn't collapse when you beat your head against it." --Douglas Adams
Thanks, @Cadi! I briefly considered re-drawing if I drew a card I drew last year, but I'm glad I didn't do that. I also think it's incredibly interesting to see how I've approached the same card each time. I think I was a lot closer to the story in 2019 (I haven't actively thought about it in quite a long time, with other projects coming before it on my to-write list), but I'm enjoying coming back to it in this way. I'm glad you're enjoying it!
Eight of coins
Wax the cottage floor with lavender and beeswax, wrenched from a swarming hive in a thunder of stings that will burn in her sleep despite her aloe-slick skin that slips against the wood of the cottage floor, waxed with lavender and beeswax bribed from a discordant hive with a secret that will become a prayer over time spent waxing the cottage floor with lavender and beeswax promised by a hive that has come to love a woman over a century of rosebuds and clover paired with sweat and memories that belonged to another girl.
She stands on top of this life she has built, tender in its imperfect beauty. There is no higher she can climb; the only way forward is to leave it all behind.
Long before she was the Sentinel, she sat in her mother's parlor entertaining suitors who could not see beneath her skin and oh, if they could have seen the way she burned, a pyre stoked in the shape of a girl.
You can get a lot done by following the rules: a husband looking the other way at afternoon tea, his respectable job lining the pockets of your best dress with enough cash to buy a life outside the one you've always lived. The thing about her is, she has never followed the rules.
Victory is a cigarette smoked on her mother's porch, shared between lips painted red. Victory is a child who does not belong to her, reaching for her hand. It is the wind through curtains draped over a canopy bed, down pillows and a pure white duvet.
The King of the forest is sick. Soot bleeds from the tips of his antlers and the earth fills his hoofprints with tar. (Once you were responsible for him. You had the world in your hands and this is what it's come to.)
Take them far from the mirror lake, where Death keeps his typewriter tapping out the breadth of your life in Morse code, but you haven't heard Morse code like this--each syllable a hard consonant, an inconvenience discarded like so many things you wish you didn't know about yourself.
What is death but movement (wind in the pines never rests, to climb to their peaks would breathe momentum into the sails of a life discarded to stagnant water, but even rainwater left in the bucket beside the cottage door breeds life that drains life that breeds death) what is movement but death borne over again and again and again.
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