All my clothes were smoke upon my flesh —
wisps of gazzatum from Palestine
or velvet from Kashmir, viscous on my thighs.
A princess, I was billowed through on cloth
with honeycombs of lace about my limbs,
and nothing coarse to callous skin and scrape
the body raw. I was a stranger to wool,
to flax, to hemp. Mystics prophesied
a linen noose would pull the night
down early over my eyes, so fires blazed
across the palace courtyard at my birth.
Rags and tapestries alike caught fever
and smoked the sun out of the morning sky.

It is curious how like a man the spindle
seems, the dropping rhythm of the whorl,
the delicate heft of the shaft, the burr of the flax
beneath my fingertips, the tension in the line,
the way it slivered its way beneath my skin,
the way it drowned my eyes fast asleep.

It takes a certain type of man to lust
for listless bodies, to find a woman dead
delicious enough to thrust into. I woke
not to the weight of marble pressed to my body
nor the tumulatious silence veiling me.
Neither bruised thighs nor rip of flesh
nor necrophilic inoculation could stab my eyes
to consciousness. I cramped and swelled, squeezed
and bled. I imagine I even echoed the barrow
walls of the castle with screams, but I did not wake.

It was my son suckling my finger that rose
me from my bier, his tongue tugging that splinter
of flax from beneath my nail. The blood nursed
into his mouth, and now I raise my children
on scars, slits of pale skin where their teeth
have found purchase. I am the only meal
they know, a waning wraith they toddle after
when their bellies snarl. I haunt these halls,
dripping scraps of the only clothing left
to me, a planh in silk that falls away
with every step. The dawn wings its way
through the horizon’s clouds and brings a falcon
into my room. Come, my darling children,
my morning star and evening jewel. Your father
is on his way. Let us invite him for supper.

BIO: Joshua Gage is an ornery curmudgeon from Cleveland, His first full-length collection, breaths, is available from VanZeno Press. Intrinsic Night, a collaborative project he wrote with J. E. Stanley, was recently published by Sam’s Dot Publishing.  He is a graduate of the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Naropa University. He has a penchant for Pendleton shirts, rye whiskey and any poem strong enough to yank the breath out of his lungs. He stomps around Cleveland in a purple bathrobe where he hosts the monthly Deep Cleveland Poetry hour and enjoys the beer at Brew Kettle.

IMAGE: Detail of Hope, Gustav Klimt, 1907-1908

Written by Erzebet

Artist, author, editor, bookbinder. Collector of bones.

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