By Louise Mather
We lie on the grass,
I'm bleeding so you use me for bait.
I want to cascade myself to a goblet
but I am made of sawtooth grapefruit,
singed petals, knots, decomposing tissue.
I dig my nails into the sand,
you have hooks and gristly maggots
and you have already licked the scent
from the back of my neck,
even if I tried to run,
which I don't anymore –
I just lie and wait
holding clumps of earth,
already descending
into the underworld
where goddesses
know of all despair –
how to be worshipped,
and scribed into stars –
the sky darkens,
I look into it, waiting for it to fall,
and I think about killing you
with your hunting knife
and stitching you to a net
for the ocean,
or hanging us from the tree
where the oldest roots plummet
to myth.
Louise Mather is a writer from Northern England and founding editor of Acropolis Journal. Nominated Best of the Net 2021, and a finalist in the Streetcake Poetry Prize, her work is published in various print and online literary journals. Her debut pamphlet ‘The Dredging of Rituals’ is out with Alien Buddha Press, 2021. She writes about ancestry, rituals, endometriosis, fatigue and mental health. She can be found on Twitter.
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