In a memory whilst I slept
upon grey, peach-stained feathers
plucked from the breasts of your cherished
tazen-eyed owls. I wove your form.
Ladies with red spindles:
cutting needles protruding
from each handless arm,
help me roll thread between my fingers
from their cumulus of silk.
They formed your bare shoulders
stitching the meat of dark cherries into your skin,
while I carve your face
and the well of your throat.
My thumbs press, indents
for your delicate eyes,
I sew in two dark Tahitian pearls
taken from the heavy side of your adored wedding gift,
the part that hung low and had touched your chest:
I open up my own. Twining bits of my lungs
into the body of your nose.
The Ladies place a thin thorned vine against my palm,
an end fixed with hair spun from lost husbands’.
I dip it into my heart’s last smile,
form your lips as they were to my eye,
warm.
I gaze,
Yet it isn’t you.
Harshly the Ladies cut away the pearls
with rusted screeching shears,
flinging your eyes into my dripping chest.
They form your lashes from nettles:
barbwire that will not open.
Now,
you seem to breath.
Each night
I dream the same.
Each night
a part of you disappears.
Tonight
I thread your locks upon your scalp
formed from rabbit fur
and stain it with pomegranate seeds.
Under the Ladies smirking eyes
I run my arms through your hair
tangling my wrists, twisting and tightening
until my blood coats each strand.
I press my forehead to yours.
Begging the Ladies to stitch my skin
to their cursed cloud of webbing.
Suffocate me. Impale me
with their handless arms.
Meld my flesh to yours.
Their red spindles turn.
Their needles click.
No matter the anguish,
in dream I cannot die.
Please open your eyes.
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Submission Name: Please Open Your Eyes.
