Will you say to them
when I'm gone
I loved your daughter
For the fire on her tongue
arms flung open
the devotion in her bones, still.

your daughter is an animal
uncontainable
She spends too much time
digging out the dirt
in her fingernails
Your daughter is too overbearing
she reeks of calamity's foreboding
her blood
soaked in dirt
your daughter scares other daughters
and sons away
her arms are too flung open
her blood and bone too sacrificial
clutching on
to hems of trousers
The quivering hands
She holds a pit in her belly
carries fire on the tip
of her tongue
burning the land and the foundations
on which she stands
Yet she worries about the visibility of her difference

The screams
infertile
delirious
The burning halo
Hanging on your neck
Your perfect edges ruffled
Grief awaits in a corner
at the dawn of tedious despair.

Something shifted that spring
The gentle hands that which caressed my bare back
Became a claw
Ripping my fragile atoms
With confusion and horror
Another faceless thing
Pulling me into the mist
Fade to black
I folded my soul over
The tremble found it's way
To the surface
In the spaces between
The cracks in the foundation.