I recently got the rights back for this one from Quantum Fairytales so here you are – a Halloween tale of monster-love 🙂 If you take the leg bone of any creature that dwells on this earth and slice it open, there in the marrow you will find a wondrous land populated with castles and…
Matchless
You are not alone. Here in the cold and the dark and the emptiness between the lives of others, there are many of us. Starving, torn out from the book and falling like brittle leaves through the stillness of a cold dusk. Here, no breeze to carry us away. Here, no light but that is not quite true. You have light. You hold it in your hand. Twelve tiny cherry tipped wands for light making. Not enough to live by, their fragile flickers burst with such bright frivolity, a lion in the night, a roar in the silence ‘I am here!’ ‘I am here!’ ‘See me feel me You are not alone.’ And then the blaze that left you blinded and hopeful fades from red to green and burns you just before it sputters out.
Opre
Our splintered marrow guards your precious ground
Not bought in blood, but taken in the twilight
When ‘taking’ was a thing we did not understand
Mulengi Sinija
There is a weight, more than the fabric, of that long black skirt and the high necked lace shirt she heaves up over her fire form. Here are the white-beaked masques now with their golden glitter and their gaudy plumes, here are the capes of scarlet velveteen, the sun is sinking with a sigh to the guillotine.
The Painter’s Daughter
How could a child do otherwise, with so much colour inside?’
So she stepped out. Stained. With the bird quill tucked behind one ear
faith in the teapot 