Welcome to the Realm of Green Dragons

Table of contents

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acid souls,

dreamer knolls,

emerald scales,

shale-tough tails.

Forest peaks,

spruce-blue trees,

poison shrouds,

wing-swept clouds.

My green dragon ride

called herself Sliptide,

or the equivalent

in her slippery serpent language.

I practiced her name,

receding the upper teeth required to speak

in The City,

though after so long on the stone mesa,

those two teeth in the roof of my mouth

missing

made my gums and calloused tongue

feel like a cave at dusk

longing after the horde of

bats who roost there

every day.

But I rode Sliptide’s back

down from the portal in the sky

over lakes

and hills,

training my ears to understand

and teaching my mouth how to move

slick

as the rain

so I didn’t look back

to the fading summoning ring.

Then

Sliptide took me to her den

where her lover dozed,

had been dozing for nine thousand years.

This was a normal green dragon thing,

they talked in an astral plane

with astral beings

and did things incomprehensible to a mortal witch’s mind

so she couldn’t explain them to me

but they sure did them

for thousands of years at a time.

Sliptide, then, only came through my portal to The City

cuz she was bored

after nine thousand years alone,

and she carried me home

for the same cause–

she showed me

acid art

carvings

deep in the den,

she told me

about her favorite places to fly,

she told me about the

storms,

the indigo sunsets,

how she wanted an egg one day

but only one,

and she laughed about

how her lover almost got stuck in a muddy lake once

trying to catch a fish,

and I let all her stories tumble over me

like they could pile up inside

then burn

hot enough

to erase

memories of desolation–