BURNED - JJ Maybank

What is a battlefield but a body?

Amelia spent so many nights dreaming of spilling her blood to the moonlight, slipping out of her bones, and slithering into the soul of someone else.

She was all bronze and bite. All venom and fistfight. She was the dawn that rose bloody and wrecked ships in its wake, but she was a siren too, somewhere deep in the aching heart of her.

Thicket of violet thorn. Oyster pearl gone rogue. All she wanted to do was dance out of her skin into another song not quite about survivors, but still a song where she could lift the knife and say yes as it flashed in the sun.

A boy kisses her with chapped lips and there is a small glimmer: a new age made of gold and gossamer, teeth and tongue, his fingertips tracing the curves of her hips and she knowing that she has a home in the wilderness of her ribs, somewhere beyond this.

When she will run across the beach, sand sticking to her pink soles and the ocean dampening her calves, she will almost feel like someone else, like lover instead of liver.

A quartz-dusk, a peach-heart, sore but delicious.

(A poetical approach at fan-fiction)

copyright: Ashe Vernon