Hindsight from Wolf Daughter
What Big Eyes
Are Grannie’s eyes meant to be small? I’m looking into their squint, wondering how to take their measure. Maybe she is deliberately myopic these days. I always fed him well she says, screwing her eyes into stitches.
What Big Ears
I ask the questions quickly and out blurts an answer defending her son from unfair accusations. There’s your mum, the pot calling the kettle black, she says pulling back the words in an instant, saying she didn’t hear me properly. I’d never say anything against your mother she says. Long ears, like a felt rabbit’s, flopping.
What Big Teeth
Don’t put someone else’s teeth in your own mouth and let them eat you from the inside, she says. Her teeth soak in the glass next to her bed. That should have been the clue that let me know something wasn’t right. There’s a reason people snap at you, unexpectedly.
If this is death, we’re doing it slowly
By silence, the words in our throats
choking with things we don’t believe
or that we don’t want to admit.
By and by without end, the breath
leaking out like an unfinished
heart bypass, bloody
knives poised above our chests.
Bi-lingually, our different languages
scaring us into our own version
of an afterlife, one for the daytime
and another for the middle of the night.
We’re not ready, we’re not
ready for this, surely?
By the skin of our teeth, holding on
to life as long as we can but how
can we resist biting, chewing
through everything to swallow
it into our own bile?
By not fighting, our meek heads
bowed to the daily routine, a bicker
with a neighbour, a loose sharp chip
of a word to our children and worse
for the stranger over there. Forgive us,
please, we didn’t understand.
Fallen
I cannot tell of the heights
he took me to without a door shutting
deep inside. I know I soared
and I may never know that feeling again.
Even now it would feel like self-betrayal
to describe it. I cannot, like an opportunistic
executioner, reanimate a body and hope
to recall its beauty, sell off the relic
of that old myself—not listening, again,
to warnings, fogged by that particular
musk of him, for the gentleness of his arms
when he was tender. And yes
I was tender too.
Flights, Issue Thirteen, August 2024
Flight of the dragonfly 