***
Sliptide’s sleeping lover
dozed in the den,
yet mud
from hundreds of years of monsoons
had nearly closed the opening.
I didn’t unblock it, though,
since she still had several thousand years
of wandering the astral plane
before waking
and I wasn’t staying
that long
just to keep the
maw of the den open,
so what would clearing just a few centuries of mud do?
But it made me wonder,
how many sleeping dragons
got buried
under mud,
falling pine needles,
dying trees
and whole rivers
and just
woke up like that
then dug themselves out
like acne
popping from the ground?
I stood vaguely on top of her den
on the hillside
then
because I was still scared
of Sliptide thinking bad of me
but thought
I probably deserved that,
I burned down
all the trees
from the twenty-seven summoning rings
and prayed
devoured memories
would twirl up through the smoke
and return to their owners
the way they never had from my breath
so they could know
what’d happened–
but maybe I should’ve known better
from the beginning
this was no way
to pay
for my guilt;
you can hardly
cut open the snake
to get the quoll out
to get the frog out
and you can hardly
pick apart the draining spell
to get out a night’s maw
to get out a memory.
What I should’ve done
was chased down the night’s corpse when I still could,
when it was still disintegrating into fluffy ash
and feeding the summoning rings,
before it blew away in the wind
to dust some leaves and rocks
and fertilize the soil;
I should’ve
gathered all the particles I could
and dipped them in water
to make clay
then filled it with straws
and spun a pot out of it
and baked it in a hearth
then cracked it
so I could pluck out
strings
of
the
past
and straighten them out
into sense and order
but no
I didn’t do that
I don’t even know if that’s possible
but I should’ve tried
for Sliptide,
a dragon
I should’ve saved
like a good little girl
does for her friends–
guilty witch,
wild witch,
jealous witch
mad witch
screwy witch
she didn’t need a summoning ring
to burn the forest
she just needed
a last
blue match
and monsoon winds
to bury the evidence
that she couldn’t undo
the knots in the past
or her mistakes
or save any frogs
by filling herself with power–
and that,
surely,
meant I
wasn’t so bad
a tyrant,
right?
Jordyn Saelor 