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Poem
Urges ushered Est’bel out of her abode –
a cottage cobbled together from cobwebs and clapboard – 
and she scuttled forth,
her nesty hair tousled
by a leaf-laced breeze

In her bony hands she clutched
dregs of a nightmeg broth
in a porcelain jar stoppered
by a coffinwood shard

Her bare feet stepped on thorny twigs
but she felt them not,
for her soles had been hardened
by countless treks across hot coals
washed up from stygian shoals

Leftward she turned,
meandering down the narrowing, twisting path,
where uprooted mandrake tendrils
clutched at her anorexic ankles,
while ravens pecked at her frayed follicles,
until she snatched a leaf
from a passing philodendron,
folding it into a tri-cornered hat
and plunking it atop her pate,
rakishly askew

Dewey sap from twisty-trunked trees
dripped onto the nape of her gnarly neck
and a raven on a nearby branch
cawed his amusement,
earning him her owlish scowl

She spied a row of rotting poppies
and plucked a bunch,
sticking them into a crevice of her hat,
then stepped onto a walkway of cracked shale slabs,
which shunned her footprints,
replacing them with snail streaks
to mark her passing

She made her way to a listing tombstone
atop a gnarled knoll encased in gelid moonbeams
and fringed by shushing sawgrass

She took a small vial of indigo glass
from beneath her shabby shawl
and pulled out a stopper made
from a finger bone of an unfaithful lover
whose pickled tongue hung from a
silver chain around her neck

She poured the contents of the vile vial 
into the porcelain jar and
listened to the fizz.
It subsided into sloshes,
reminding her of the sounds
issuing from demented shells
snatched from the forlorn shores
of stygian shoals

She gaped at the sky
as an owl flew past the moon,
stirring the dark craters,
which broke up into swirling spirals,
sucking lunar beasts beneath the surface,
where they dissolved in the ceaselessly sliding sands

And Est’bel raised the jar to her lips
and drank a toast to the moon,
and awaited the enshadowed shades
drifting down the snail-slimed pathway,
propelled by a leaf-laced breeze
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