stolen bindings

He dives down into that deep and pulls out her flowered heart. Her flowered heat. Her.

In pieces she finds his eyes; they look and glance and shroud themselves with heavy lids, let themselves fall out of sockets too big for words that burst out of his mouth.

He expands to fill her bookideas, her philosophies of page and time. He thumbs through her feet and crawls between her dirt-worn toes, blinking at this new born light.

She spills into his mouth, spiraling away from her own twilight beginnings, from her own stolen bindings, into his pirated stomach, where ships lie in wait and decay, where she will be forgotten, a plank of his past, once nailed to his heart.

Not even the iron remains between them.

So many times he has reached into her for his muse, fingernails scraping at her inside space, clawing out each grain of pressurized sand, each glass masterpiece. He swallowed them and made them his own.

She wishes her empty.

His fingertips only write. To touch her blackgolden skin would be to profane a disgraced angel of hell. The blood that pours out drops into words, a skirt of heinous perfection for his would-be bride.

They had been pieced together with bits of silent cacophony, their lives sewn with wooden needles, threads spilling out onto onyx skin. They were old fabric laundered and ripped away, they were faded to a bluejean touch, they had been one and two and many and none.

She opens her eyes to a morningless sky, the air falling on her upturned lap, collecting in her hollows and spaces, finding her lost. Words play at her synapses, twapping and twipping wires in her unused joints, begging for release and pleading for confinement. He cracks open her arm and steals a coffeeword to brighten his morning pages. It is not ‘til later that she sees the newmade scartattoo, the mark healing over the thievery like they have for so many millennia. She traces their lines on neverdays; she wills a beginning to be found; she finds only fingerprints of him.

He sleeps on their floor now; the mattress’ softness digs into his ribs and keeps his eyes blind. He once kept her tight, his nightprize, his fluttering bird. He held her together, grabbing at pieces, tailor and carpenter, mind exhausted by her flightless wings. But now he trusted her collapsed cocoon. She was his empty

piece

Time wrapped the moon in blacklit agony. He looked up at her foreignsmiling face and discovered his voice was a silent wind at the back of her too full mind. She had stolen away, been taken by hands not made, not knit, not fingertipped for full productive power. His web of words, his fountainous resting place, his pieces of blacktipped evernight, were shrines to new goddessforms.

He had met her as a sun, her roiling light blinding in its ferocity . He turned her into a moon, a pale piece to illuminate his blackened corners. Now she was a starspeck in his darkened eyes, out of his orbit and far from his wants. He heard her voice echo off the cavernous sky.

She was new without him.

Freedom is just an unbound prison. Mother pieced this together for me when I saw her fall from the crown and crawl into an empty book. She let the pages bind her, sweat into the leather and ink her worries and praise. And when he found her, an unlocked book, she let him take her. He closed the door but I watched through the walls as he ripped each page apart and laid her on his bed. I watched as he dipped into his own ear and rescribed each line. I watched as she came back to his eyes, as she coalesced into someone he could rape, as he pushpinned her to his wall and softly kissed her cheeks. I watched as she exhaled relief and inhaled a knowing smile. I watched and she saw me. I watched and she would not die.

I wished her empty.

She told me I was her wishing star. She kissed my black eyes and gave me her imperfect fingertips. She promised I would come true. Held up to the light, you could see her letters float through my veins. I hid my hands under synthetic fibers. I wanted none of her words.

He wanted me for a moon. He scooped me out and hung me in his sky, my feet looped around a hook made of hope and fastened with a bit of semi-precious twine. The knots were careless; he thought I would shine willingly, thought he could bask in my frozen teardrops. He carried a pistol in his front right pocket; he said it was for unwanted watchers.

Who do they watch?

They watch for you.

Her garden of stone roses and marble violets lived. Under the cover of bightday sun, I pulled back that unhinged gate and climbed over the perfect wall. I stepped on slabs of conquered paper and left my prints on petals dying. I lifted pens to write on bricks that would build her purpose, but they ran dry; falling out of skeleton fingers they would bury into that fertiledead ground and spring anew.

I weave a net of intentions. I spin my thread under newmoonlight, careful not to hide it from her unblind eyes. I make it vast and tight. I make it wordproof. I make it her.

I want her empty                                 light

that she keeps in a cupboard beneath her words, hidden from her black eyes, too bright for her to stand.

She is a forgotten mirror of home.

I want no home.

I walk into her forgotten shrine, light a wick of stale incense. I burn out her words with cinnamon and sage, but the scars have stories of their own, and I am a prisoner of her as well. A sigh falls out of her mouth. She says she is content. He bleeds her blueblack thoughts into distilled moonshine and drinks his fill nightly. Her eyes are white and knowing. She tells me to leave.

I have grown into your ground. I am hanging in his sky. He sleeps with his knife at my lip.

I cannot leave.

She covers herself in his need. Wrapped in a shell, I must shout my love. I claw at this new cage, I pull at each lose thread, but she has found safety here. She does not want to be freed. She finds happiness in his hands.

And so will you.

Days dawn frequently here. Pieces of night are swept under rugs and chairs and windows are opened to catch breezes of new. Light and words play hide and seek under unused beds, then slip through floorboards to basements and cellars and crumbling foundations, filing away unseen dreams from the night before. Cobwebs hang over musty trunks, each full of trips not taken and memories too expired to be valid. The air is laden with spice, the pungent smells familiar and foreign mixing into a cocktail of sweet putridity. Bit of time nailed to walls rot before they are even found; touch turns them to finest dust.

She sits at a desk of glass he blew out of her forfeited future. She types into his open hands, letting her words fall away to keep them whole and unbruised. She does not stop to breathe. She does not stop to remember.

The cocoon in the corner breathes out a sigh.

He swallows her words whole. He is a brokenwingedbird. He peers down her alleyways and into her buildings and she stares back with cold dark eyes in a stonebeautiful face.

She sleeps in his net of intentions. She pulls his woven blankets over her face and sleeps in the world of unknowning.

It is now they who are bits of fabric sewn into a skinquilt of sorts. It was no foreign hand of fate that took this job, but her own trembling fingers that pulled each needle through her own wasted limbs, drowning out the words of the mother with each stitch.

I ran away once. I slipped through the keyhole while they slept, her eyes open and watching my descent. I took the hand of a passing bluecold stranger. His eyes cut at my lips, diamonds against my marble face. I retrace the scars with my tongue.

They taste like empty.

I stayed away forever. I kept my back towards the moon, back towards the sun, back towards the mirrors that wanted me back. I stapled my ears against the voice of my father and snapped off my fingers so my words were no more. I lived in a tower with my bluecold lover and I slept under sheets of misery-perfection. I lived outside of time. I counted pearls without shame. I drank the wine of his pictures and watched as my words turned sour.

But freedom is just an unbound prison. I put down my glass and unburied my forgotten limbs, stretching into old prints and joints. I opened hands and bled onto the walls, my words covering our tower with their piercing need.

I killed my bluecold lover. I poisoned his picturewine with my words of discontent and longing. I burned down the tower and flew back to my garden. Nothing had changed. They were waiting.

I give him my words. He will not leave me a set of scars to make into a shroud. I give him my words, whole and perfect, so I can stay.

I do not hang in his sky. I am no one’s moon.