BY ELIZABETH THERIOT
The Fates ask where the Underworld went with its lake of ghosts
Summer left a grave of black cherry pits and twisted stems. Autumn waits on the sidewalk, down the stairs, to burn leaves and smudge the city in its smoke. We’ve sat in this between blinking sleep from our eye, collecting all the seasons’ fraying ends.
Banishment: when the soul wants to dig itself up.
Someone said not to write soul in a poem. Someone told us catastrophizing was the right verb but catastrophe is grey funk beneath our nails, a catastrophe on the scalp, caking pores, a layer of grit. We drink Windex until our eye sees clean.
Exile: where the body chooses to bury itself.
Circling the Dog-Moon Heroine
(a story in fortunes)
Throned in leather Hierophant waits
two fingers double-
pillared. Speaks
binaric code like,
this is what my centuries have created. It is good.
It’s real good.
Hierophant wipes BBQ
palms on the couch
waits for someone else
to clean it up.
Someone always does, who likes the couch,
cares if it looks pretty.
Hierophant waves
fish-spine gold
and cleanpicked
(fondant crown a-dripping)
His eyes Abrahamic, like
not my fault
sad shrug. Keys crossed on the carpet.
All the while ma folds
laundry, and your ma too.
//
So here goes the fat
yellow moon shedding skin at the crossroads :
dogs shocked by
sharp girly moon,
tails bristle like
terrified of dew, plush ears
underfed and curling. Ma curls
your hair with a hot wand.
Sunflowers fat-bubble
along the wall. Whose blood
on the rocks? Ma straightens
your hair
with an oiled spatula
and the cinderblock towers
go sizzle in-
between.
After all the hullabaloo
you’re a baby again, Age of Aquarius baby
crying, little Bacchus baby
the deferential horse
in globs of playdough sun,
baby body WHEE between horse-blades,
jazz-hands like
a birthday gift, red feather
in your jelly ringlets
and Ma
with a quick wrist-snap
folds laundry, unfolds laundry to make the beds.
Muse Epistle
Scars below my skin are proof
you were gestated—raised, fed—
divinatory cradle—grown in minutes,
warm between my painted toes.
And the petals opened:
Water empty like bitten
skin around nails, my palms
stretched into pollen and flame—
candle pyre altar spelled the same.
You should have warned me
when I loved
as fetish-tucked-in-drawer;
your long gone infancy;
eyes dripping
in caverns you devour
songbirds
then crawl into bed, unsocket
my limbs and dab glue
as ointment—
slow burn, elegy, I
have let it happen.
Elizabeth Theriot is a queer southern writer with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. She earned her MFA from The University of Alabama and is writing a memoir about disability and desire. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, and a teaching fellow with the nonprofit Desert Island Supply Company. You can find her work in Yemassee, Barely South Review, Winter Tangerine, Ghost Proposal, Vagabond City, A VELVET GIANT, Tinderbox, and others. She lives in Birmingham, AL.