THESE TREES KNOW FIRE THE WAY MY BODY KNOWS TOUCH |
I have always been dry grass. Smoke. The ruins that make up my grandfather’s home. This night, the scent of fennel. The scars on my wrists and arms. And what is a girl but a knife. All wilderness. God, you can’t expect me to be good. I’m half-thicket, half-thorn. I’m half-made of water. Up ahead there’s a barn on fire. No, it’s covered in autumn leaves. And water floods from my eyes. No, it’s rain falling from the clouds staining the sky. The trouble with water: it lets nothing go untouched. Like hunger. And what was my crime but to turn to water: to let nothing go untouched, tracing a wrist-bone, a bow of lips. Fingers tracing the veins of the leaf I plucked off a branch. Thumbing the blade of a butter knife. I watch the grass bow to the breeze and I submit to my hungering hands, to the burning barn within me. |