Breadcrumb #513

CHLOE CRAWFORD LA VADA

I never think of you these days, down in the Beneath
where the sun cannot remind me – where the only light
that shines dazzles mistily from a disco-ball moon. 

Here, I wear the shadows like silk. I skinny-dip in the
River Lethe, the dead bumping against me like buoys,
forgetting you more and more with each lick of the waves. 

My midnight metropolis glows like a deep-sea fish,
nestled in the lowest dark of the Great Downstairs, where
everyone sees my true face, where I am proudly known as Queen. 

But, spring ruptures through winter’s rime and ruins
the oblivion of a peaceful, perpetual neon-night; it knows
that life must move on in its slaughter of cycles and seasons. 

In your world Above, beauty melts from my face like frost;
my real self withers, a bone-flower blooming in reverse,
unsewn from hearing the whispers of a name dead as dust. 

There, all I have buried returns to haunt me; even your mirrors
show a stranger with only the vaguest trace of me. I dream
of the day when the daffodils die and autumn claws ever closer.

 I wait for the leaves to wilt like lies, wait for the earth
to quiver and crack apart. I wait for the black, toothless mouth
of the ground to split wide and swallow me whole.

 Every roadmap of scars brings me back to a city, a cemetery,
where we lay in our graves - where everyone died long ago
in the eyes of our parents, our families, our friends.

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