I walk in the crisp, cool air of spring
and everything is budding green. It’s beautiful
and bittersweet. Love is
buried under the thawing earth and
fresh-grown grass, just barely
out of reach.
Mother doesn’t understand. She never has,
really. I’ve always been an odd child,
an unexpected hybrid of dandelion fluff and
pomegranate seed. I know she looks at me and
sees a stranger in place of her own blood.
What did she expect? I danced over Death
as the harvest remains rotted in their fields
every autumn. I reveled in the end of the cycle
as well as Life’s beginning. I touched the dryads and
ignored their cries, watched as their leaves
turned color, wilting and falling
to the ground,
a gorgeous ending.
He was everything I ached for. His hands
rough and heavy with the weight of
bringing souls to harvest. Death
never tasted so sweet as his kiss, and I
was gladly lost to his touch.
He knew the ripeness of my
womanhood and
ate it whole.
He made me a queen. Do you know
how intoxicating it is to
hold a soul in your palm, to
weigh its worth? A man’s life is
infinitesimal against the measure of
the entire cosmos. And yet
the soul’s my king has in his keeping
are rubies and emeralds and diamonds and gold
and all of the precious things mankind
tries to collect in vain. He holds the power of
Death
in his hands. No one is immune,
not even Mother. Let her try to keep me here
among the mindless nymphs and
their dancing forms. Let her try to make me drink
of Lethe, to forget his teeth
on my neck.
We are the embodiment of Life and
Death, the divine cycle. We are a forever thing
that even the gods must bow before
and nothing,
nothing
will keep me from my love.
Larissa Lee 