She stares into her lacquered mirror
beyond her own reflection,
A lake
A pond
An ocean.
She’s pulling up the chains from the water.

“Aren’t you ashamed of your prisoners?” she asks them.

She sits by the door in a blue dress
in case there is a mouse that dares stir.
With her forked tongue, she can swallow it up.
Nobody can resist her in a blue dress.

She’s sitting on her bed wrapped in white silk.
She’s tearing out her ashen hair.
She’s peeling back her flesh
so she can find her bones.

“Bones are white, bones are strong” she chants.

She does not cry for lovers.
She weeps only for herself.
She takes each acid tear drop
and strings them on her severed thread.
She wears them like Mother’s pearls.
She whispers,

“Who can make two lovers become one another?

Who can make two lovers love?

Who can make two lovers sleep forever,

On a bed of two lovers’ love blood?”

She does not believe in the flowers.
She has seen what they do to bees.

“The flowers,” she says, “make the bees drop dead.”
She knows how the bees get drunk
from the Scotch Brooms’ fermented fruit.

She has no faith in the sun.
The sun has never waken her,
for it does not love her like it loves the grass and the Living Things.
She sleeps by day and rises by moonlight,
and she consults the stars,

“What good is day when it is gone in the morning?”