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
Tag Archives: writing
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
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
Pocket of Rage
Sorry, sorry, my bad, I don’t have the words for why. Make a mistake break a cake freak out and shout end the tear duct drought stab Gacks and slay racks, I’m so angry I could just cry the whole time.
3- born
I emerged from the school in a thunderstorm, surrounded by strangers banging pots and tins and wearing crinkly aluminum clothing. Of course the lightning struck them.
Witch names/from that age
Upon my graduation from the demonic witch school in my hundred and thirty-second year, I chose the name Kook, Witch Kook, and didn’t care how silly it sounded. At least it wasn’t Isabel. Witch Isabel sounds like a question my second grade teacher would ask, “Which Isabel does this
2- from this feeling
Examine, Isabel, why you removed yourself from all this feeling. Isabel, Clarissa, sitting in a tree, best pals forever, don’t you see, first leave family then hurt friends then earn witch names on a graduation stand. First comes love, then comes terror, then comes capture at a dark school no one’s ever heard of.
