Thaw-Borne Grace

I beat the frozen ground,

rended it with my stone fists

but it couldn’t let me out

/

into the light of the gilded rays,

threads merely borrowed,

infamous for their fragility

/

and their famine-song.

I bargained with the darkness,

offered it the gold in my ears

/

in exchange for an escape hatch.

Instead, it produced a feather

and taught me how to write

/

in my own blood.

Except my sanguinary pen

was too heavy.

/

The blood came—

the words didn’t.

And I screamed with the song of a mouse;

/

‘Let me out, let me out,’

but the bedrock wrapped itself around me,

a mausoleumic cocoon.

/

when my voice winked out, a candle

in a storm, the ensuing

silence was exquisitely death-dealing.

/

Until the nadir of the earth taught me her songs

and how to hear them.

Carried through the rot

/

by the roots and worms,

the seashells held to my ear,

showing me the ocean of the below.

/

The icy, rocky womb brought

the stories, wove the melodies,

and all throughout the unseen winter

/

I grew fat on the old tales reborn,

sucking the marrow out of fable-bones,

letting the gristle catch in my teeth.

/

Letting the pen lay, for a time,

and learning how to leave it without the shame while

I was taught to listen.

/

When the snowmelt came,

I didn’t see,

swaddled, as I was,

/

in lithic utero,

rockbound in the waiting room

so the snow couldn’t shrivel me up.

/

The grease of Scheherazade

dripping down my cheeks,

I reached for my feather-sword

/

and found I could, once more,

wield it.

In an older voice, I asked

/

‘now?’ and in answer

a single starbeam

led me to the birth canal—

/

I stretched a hand out,

just in time,

and it broke through the crust of the earth,

/

born into moon-warded spring,

isolation-taught, blood-written vellum:

a single bloom.

//