Landscape of a Heart – Page 9

Mind

You don’t need an astral plane, Sliptide said, eating her fish. You need to recover from whatever you did and saw on that stone mesa. And I said, I spent seventy years learning what took most demons and

7- Muse my dragon

If you poke a sleeping dragon they don’t wake. Why do I know? Cuz Sliptide poked her lover fifty times in her sleep the first night I was there. So I left the den, realizing otherwise

I asked Sliptide

I asked Sliptide one night under the spinning moons and planet’s rings if she’d ever met a witch before. Not because I wondered about you, Clarissa; mountain dragons and green dragons have fundamentally different

Welcome to the Realm of Green Dragons

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

6- up again

(slight trigger warning for this poem: short descriptions of death and carnage) *** The green dragon almost didn’t want to go back home, she wanted to fly past the desert I’d never crossed and find a sea and eat the

5- down with

how long do you think it took me to leave? Not just leave The City, but leave the icy sun, stone mesa and copper domes where people and rats lived? The kid who

Rails

Rails, Rails, Off the Rails, hear her wails–Rails, Rails, she must fail, fall to

Training barrage

Studying amongst immortal demons and dragons–keeping myself alive on life force and blood–must’ve messed up my sense of time, cuz Rails sped like a rumbling train before I had time to look back. She didn’t spend seventy-something years at a witch school, but she learned what I taught her about

4- kid

The kid had a name. Most kids in The City didn’t. The City discouraged naming people, said names distracted them from their jobs in the factories, in the farms, in the offices. Only the patrollers got names: if you chose to join (technically, everyone who joined chose

My first hero

The copper dome could’ve been a school or a mansion or a hill somebody polished. But people definitely lived inside, I could hear them talking, their machines buzzing, noises drifting to the mesa like heartbeats through a demon’s