Tears flow down my star-studded ruddy cheeks, rivulets singing for home, springing from a heartwell of liminal time. A maiden without hands tearing into the dark night, knowing not of comfort or safety, knowing not yet the ways of the forest, a long way from her wood sisters, stumps bleeding, appendages mocking. But now the game’s up and her heart is too wide that it contains the entire oceans and the soft pulse of deep hibernating time.

Bear thunder down on my belly and watch me explode. Watch me become mad, mercurial, savage. Bear fire on her skin and watch the woman shriek and howl as she is burned alive. The myth of the devil possessing the maiden has become the myth of poetry possessing those who dare to dream differently. Much further and tangled we must go.

The wind howls down into the chimney and it stirs my mind. Here I sit alone bumbling through fake poetry. I want to feel a myth inside of me so full that it pours out. Time before and time after. The stillness is the dancing. We had the experience but missed the meaning. The rupture without the rapture. Let me not miss another day of making meaning. Of making life sacred by the attention I give to it.

This is the problem – I give so much attention that my heart ruptures.

The skeleton bones of the earth protruding like broken limbs from the thin veneer of high-altitude forest. They tell me about my age. They tell me about my fragility, that thin peach skin, the pierce of a blade.

I need more myths and I need more stories. For now I will hold myself tender and know this is a doorway I must pass through. There are things that need to break. I walk out into the storm tonight. I let the daybreak ghost possess me, bear down upon my neck, and I let him do it, I let it happen, because yes and it makes we warm thinking about it, thinking about that kind of shadow love in the dawn.