Skinny Prayers
The sirens are gone now
Decaying with the city swirl-
Its rectangle of light can’t catch the infinite tan of your skin
As the pulp has fallen flat over searing bone;
because outside is the eye of the scorn, of loathing, like the root of
fire on your chest’s arc,
Like the song of Seraphim--
who exhales chains that shackle you in your own bedroom,
the shroud of blankets you lay under-
rippling breath
Named skinny by the gods,
they gave you a scale to meditate on
or a meal strewing a heavy odor only to be heaved back up again--
What faith locks its gate until
slivers of dark seep in like murk in an alley
as you realize that darkness was only simmering hunger,
something sepulchral gaping with sooty lips;
Last night you spent drifting in sedation from pills
you thought could only make an oath of credulous dreams
or a shawl of skin that wrongs, wrongs, wrongs bags of saggy flesh
to be weightless from feminine ills.
Skinny: the loveliest of Eve's children;
she lured men to chase her, offering their lechery and love
like crushed cranberries in a rust pail-
her heartstrings were painted gold with scars erased
And she, like you broke the laws of the earth:
a killer who did not know what could kill.
Now as your heartbeat turns to the sigh of a riverbed,
brass air against your belly, you decide that oxygen will replace a heaping plate-
a gnarled fog beneath your palms which kept time silent;
pressed against the cold dampness of your chest.
Speckles of mud on the mind’s dew: it is here that after
joy's mate dazes you with its mill there is only blood left
stilled from its own tide, as you have drowned a singing girl
And gave birth to a void-- no candle can move the salmon of your flesh
That withers in the fugitive night.
Copyright © Brooke Avery | Year Posted 2015
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