Spell for leave-taking
You cannot take this, too, from me.
You cannot.
You cannot.
You cannot.
I was watching
as you stuck your tongue out
to catch one last drop,
memories unspooling
in sticky-sweet rivulets
on her death-throbbing thighs.
Even sated
you kept lapping at them
unaware that, all this time,
I was watching,
witching with the spells left me
by women fast asleep
in their graves, many hungers away,
dreaming of resurrection,
of gravediggers pulling weeds
out by the teeth.
I see.
I see now.
I see
how your mother laid out her silk,
knitted cobwebs with her swollen womb
till she was satisfied
with her trap,
her handsome cocoon
that would never starve,
not like she had.
I know all this
and knowing all this,
I -
I, too,
I take.
I take leave
of these shores
with you,
your entrails
wrapped around my throat
like pearl strings,
a traveller’s amulet,
a gift from your mother
to me.
Too much
I was full of poetry and song
once. You wrung them from me
with your bare silences
like you couldn’t stand a higher register
of love or the fury that comes
with having wings too large to spread
in rented bedrooms,
on bed sheets stained
with coffee
and blood.
You made me tiptoe
around your wordlessness,
careful not to spill
my guts all over your complacency
careful not to utter the wrong
word, whatever it may be that day,
whether ‘revolution’ or ‘torture’
or something in-between.
I shrunk my body to a whisper,
fed on your lunacies until you wondered
why I was
always
so
sick.
I had to become my own doctor
because consultations are a confessional
of wounds and mine were dressed
in social standards. I had to pick
at the scabs till the gaping mouths
underneath released their roaring rage
and then
there was no turning back. I became
the monster you’d always feared,
with too much space to take
and never enough time
never enough
body to fill
with my
self
so hungry.
The crowd around the Mona Lisa never changes
puzzling over her smile
not really that
but
puzzling over what
they have been told
to be
beautiful
their own beauty
slipping away from them
through the focal lens
of a camera
*
DaVinci would have taken
each of their faces
reduced them to numbers
superimposed their wonder
in search of God
when all he needed, really
was to flip a coin
or a mirror.
Flights, Issue Thirteen, August 2024
Flight of the dragonfly 