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my atelier
You've caught me, bedraggled with my smithereens— squeezed cherries, their flesh plump on mine, on this ashen scraped canvas.
I squint my eyes to see you walk in; milky florets have been flattened upon the soles of your feet, blossoms that are my torturous thoughts.
Ask me not what has come down here, but pray tell, in your aloneness, have you, somehow, in your macrocosm of cartography, chamomile tea and charcoal pencils
drawn your way here into my unloved atelier? Have you unearthed me and all of my lilies, my linens and the lineage of my agony that trickles like a river and very seldom ceases?
The corners of your maps shall soaken become; it won't be long, upon the hundredth beat of the heart, in its quietness, the rosy water shall submerge those lenient footpaths, those linden trees, all those black lines.
Your feet have settled before my easel. A sea-soaked butterfly like a gargoyle sits perched upon the almond wood as my cooling rooibos tea, along with the drowsy spring wind, suffuses our senses.
It is not you, in whom terror sloshes like wine— it is the butterfly quivering whilst looking at you; an eye for an eye. I close my fist over the hem of my cotton dress.
