A full moon hovers but holds its weight.
Its light refuses to lift the night.
Stay in the darkness with me, it pleads.
Be still, she hears and halts in the green of the matted grass.
Impatient trees swing against the sky, their branches wink to say,
You have muddied your feet, dear.
They see her head of dirty hair, they see her crooked soul.
Perhaps, she is not welcome here.
A black cat steps, somnolent, into her shadow.
Come closer, whispers the moon, as if withholding something precious,
but please don’t cross her path.
The last thing she needs is another bad omen.
Like the time she dreamt of bodies parachuting down from the sky,
striking the earth, soft and menacing – dead or alive?
Delirious or just hungry for gravity?
The ground trembles in memory of her dream, like the thunder of a hundred hooves. The cat rubs against her legs and gives up a flirtatious gaze.
A spark escapes its eye, a faint clamor in the heavy air, and she remembers the fiery eyes from the night before.
How she’d held the taut, fawn-colored flesh like a gentle prison.
The cat smiles and says, don’t go just yet.
But the grass is deathly thick, the clock says it’s that hour, she must find a way home.
She must cleanse, bathe away the blood under her nails.
Breathe again, somewhere, escape this darkness, somehow.
Rid her skin of sour smells.
Before it is time to fuel again, to feed, to devour.
I loved your words like a gentle caress.