A Furious Loom

Lost in a wilderness unfelt, an empty bed devours light. We sing, relinquished. I dissonance, uncharted. A cracked riverbed, this drought of trust, this heaving doubt. Dryrot, this festering bile. I'll think of you on the way down. Accusations need a scapegoat. Intentional, this nightmare. A speck of blood on the gallows. A shovel of cemetery dirt. Evidence of culpability. I stand accused. I stand. Skeletons hang on a clothesline. Resurrection dance, a prelude. A Pandora's box of possibility, boundless seas of infinity. Destruction knows not when. Cocoon this bitter end. Circling a burning field, worry not about consequence. Pain makes us beautiful. Pain makes us real. Love leaves us curled into a weeping ball in someone else's dream. A figment. Love is nothing if not nothing. In darkness, we crawl, we claw. Ever reaching for a home. Ever reaching for another. Ever reaching for the stars. Ever reaching with empty hands. Between two filthy lips. A taste of wickedness. You envy it. Such mercurial flavor before harbingers of famine arise. Doves red with innocent blood. A grasping of thorns. Crossroads. Crossbow. Crossbones. A purge. Raven wings rise from my shoulder blades, an arch of ebony feathers. Talons claw from my fingertips. I cannot fly, but burrow. Miles deep underground. The earthy smell of peat in my nostrils, a bite of bog on my tongue. Let the sun burn out above me. I need no light in the grave I've dug.

V.C. Myers is the author of Ophelia (Femme Salvé Books, 2023) and Give the Bard a Tetanus Shot (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019). She has been an editor and reader for Sarabande Books, Barren Magazine, Ice Floe Press, and Frontier Poetry. Her work appears in ekphrastic exhibits and journals worldwide, including EPOCH, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and Bombay Gin.