bree

"No, what?", I would say.

"A piece of dust."

Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'

And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.

One day 

I may forget

Your voice

Your face

Your name

Like you pressed a finger

Into my shoulder 

And the moment I turned my head

the dead like the stories didn’t all

tell me these things never come

back right.

But I am a necromancer of skill.

I bring back the soul and

never the wound.

I am the wound. I am the

necromancer who gets it right.

The stories were mistaken. Dead things

don’t come back wrong they

come back exactly the same.

I am the one who has changed.

I am a different girl who carries

all the same wounds.

In my grief

I am deadly.

In my grief I

decay .

I cannot leave the dead alone.

The dead do not leave me alone and I

Eve knew, I think, better than to believe

the thoughts were her own.

It was the darkest place her mind could go.

God said “If you eat of the apple, you

will die.”

Its waxy skin would catch the sun and

gleam red.

She thought it’d be juicy and sweet–

death.

She stopped then, I think. She realized

it was not what she wanted but

what she couldn’t have.

The apple.

It was like this for a long time. The urge,

intruding– a visitor she’d

hurry away. The thoughts were not

her own. All of this was true, most likely but

it does not change the fact that

she wanted the apple and she