Only In The Empty

Susan McKechnie

changing back her head into the flower she began from

You can't know who your membrane
chose you to be, to be crowned damaged
and shortened before the saw, before your pecked
trunk like a rotting seed, old in the bowels of the forest,
a bone overturned, and when you came it was like
asteroid, and when you fall the leveling is deadly
and petty, the fatigue of nothing but yourself flattened
by the horizon and the endless day your metallic
wind twisted

I am not survived anymore, It is only the memory of that

And the thing that comes bursting through
your ribcage is only pity, and there is no intrigue
in your weeping by the statue of your beginnings,
broken arms and a genuine ghost, and your cranium
is a ledge birds shit on, and they think nothing of you
as they pierce the sky, murdering your wings with their
surgery, and you think nothing of the brown you've become
in their shadow and in the shadows of your hate

There is a grassy place that sways in the thorn of your keeping

The table is a trembling plateau, the salvaged one
is the one who dines in between rapes, she prays for
something wild, and cries at the foot of no one,
who bellows fruits pink and bloody but full of oxygen,
and they will climb her like a vine, but she will be
shielded
from disaster by her love

I did not come looking for you, You were formed

Combing out the hair of a pair of dead twins,
their matted limbs are decorations for battle,
their limitless weight is held by the strips of your
remembrance straddled by something you can
fuck and taste, a desire for the cure is out-dated,
you mimic every crime under the sun where it is
hot and savage, and you will expire unnoticed

I didn't come looking for you
You were not what I wanted to find
to pray wild in the dark without fingers
your opal heart in a pail of mud
I fed you to the bastards and then
waited like a siren, but you were gone