marie antoinette

i soften in this season; 

i do not know if you will ever forgive me. if you could see me; my fists milky, my eyes purpling; i soften in this season. i drink mercury and gunpowder, the afterlife of empty-chested & handed messengers; i move in kinship and kingdom. i move to the violet beat of prophecy, the stars spinning a last violence, black feathers, there is a murder on your porch, babe! divinity shines like the blood on your loafers. i will forgive you, i will soften in this season. i stretch, aurora swimming in the current of the earth; my hands tremble now, do your hands tremble now? i carve my initials with the horns on my head;

the first thing i created was my sin. a rib from vengeance, a mouth from my father, here is the secondary, the helper, the serpent's vessel: myself, written with a blunt flame. i could be something; only once, soft and dirty, sinking into the mud, this season; the flittering and dead spiders curled inward, attached to my wrists; i do not want to participate in the act of creation anymore. alas, all that talent lost to time and love and an expanding smallness; to be good enough, to be tiny enough to fit in the mouth and down the throat; to be swallowed is to never be good enough, so now i quake as i let the water nymphs drink from my knuckles. so instead of my name, there is only a signature of grief: the ultimate spiral petroglyph, the circular motion, the revolution around object, the gravity of death dizzying. every song, i listen

to twice. the first to hear, the second to dip my hand in the echo; hollow remembrance to dot my eyes, generational sunshine; it is all hand-me-down and fits badly on my freckled red face; the indus valley boys knew the better light, the newer, they did not know the end was coming. did they know the end was coming? did they shake their fists at heaven? mother wolf,

the limp cub in your jaws does not bode well, you; wait for the season.