And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Even here, on her truffle hooves and birch-bark legs, curled in the belly of a mountain ewe, she does not know how to become a thing sharp enough to sink between the rib-cage bones of this cage. This deep in the herd she can hear her sister spinning round like a snake in the eyes. She can hear the whisper of her horn as it tries to cleave this new world in which they run into a million pieces instead of two.
A forest of nightshade, or a sea of it, could not tame every drop of eternity she can feel pressed against her outside (where she is not in the herd but rather the unicorn that the herd is in.).
Her heart is a fractal of light painted on a frosted window when she tries to rise like bile from the stomach, to the lungs, to the mandible, to the eye where her sister is waiting. It waivers in the moonlight, and the sunlight, and the starlight. It waivers, and reflects, and refracts, until even her heart becomes light in her fern chest instead of organ.
And each light, each fractal arrow, races from her chest in search of Isolt.
She is running on the fletchings of them and each leg is a feather caught on the same breeze that fluttered in a butterfly flock through the ram’s lungs. Her horn is the point of the arrow, ruby and gestalt melded down to a point shaper than diamond. Each bone in her body welds itself down into the grain-wood and smooth hunger upon which the fletching sings. But even as an arrow she does not know how to become sharp enough to sink into flesh and sinew.
Even as an arrow she only presses a kiss into Isolt when she screams like a fox. It is the only war she knows how to fight and lilacs bloom in her own eyes when she tries to sink into the fairy eyes of the sheep.
Danaë does not know how to sink in, how to run in the ash and fill up the cracks of her teeth with the bruise-blue of soot. Her teeth scrape on the knotted eye of a pine tree leaning down to press snow into her spine as it bows low, low, low as a rising moon. The flavor of soot, and life, and wood half-rotten, settles on her tongue. It burrows in like a worm until she can feel lichen curling upwards to the fractal sun, and moon, and stars on the roof of her mouth.
She opens her mouth so that Isolt might pull all the constellations out of her and cast them into the cosmic darkness waiting in her belly.
A forest of nightshade, or a sea of it, could not tame every drop of eternity she can feel pressed against her outside (where she is not in the herd but rather the unicorn that the herd is in.).
Her heart is a fractal of light painted on a frosted window when she tries to rise like bile from the stomach, to the lungs, to the mandible, to the eye where her sister is waiting. It waivers in the moonlight, and the sunlight, and the starlight. It waivers, and reflects, and refracts, until even her heart becomes light in her fern chest instead of organ.
And each light, each fractal arrow, races from her chest in search of Isolt.
She is running on the fletchings of them and each leg is a feather caught on the same breeze that fluttered in a butterfly flock through the ram’s lungs. Her horn is the point of the arrow, ruby and gestalt melded down to a point shaper than diamond. Each bone in her body welds itself down into the grain-wood and smooth hunger upon which the fletching sings. But even as an arrow she does not know how to become sharp enough to sink into flesh and sinew.
Even as an arrow she only presses a kiss into Isolt when she screams like a fox. It is the only war she knows how to fight and lilacs bloom in her own eyes when she tries to sink into the fairy eyes of the sheep.
Danaë does not know how to sink in, how to run in the ash and fill up the cracks of her teeth with the bruise-blue of soot. Her teeth scrape on the knotted eye of a pine tree leaning down to press snow into her spine as it bows low, low, low as a rising moon. The flavor of soot, and life, and wood half-rotten, settles on her tongue. It burrows in like a worm until she can feel lichen curling upwards to the fractal sun, and moon, and stars on the roof of her mouth.
She opens her mouth so that Isolt might pull all the constellations out of her and cast them into the cosmic darkness waiting in her belly.
