{Excerpt}

Butterflies in a dying season, float in a mysterious rhythm, acknowledging their end in a youthful flow of sunlight and hope

The cicada song of summer has grown absent in lowering humidity, a lull that foreshadows its cease, that beckons a familiar longing from me

Corvids toll of the end, they frame their shadows about me in pentacle fashion, designing of my psyche and body a crossroads, in the flare of a savage star

I learned young, if I should scream in panicked fear, the hounds will rise of gnarled roots, howling my demise from their sanctioned corners, reflecting my afterlife in their gazing orbs

I center my thoughts with eyes shut, taking in the swell of ripe orchard, encouraging the growth of fruit within my palm, the forming of origins

Raising the gilded red skin to my lips, I sink my teeth in, allowing juice to slip my mouth, chin, throat, spitting the tender chunk of flesh to my feet, a snake approaches and covets the discarded

Hunger of temptation, hunger of control, I feel the vibrations of the earth in quake intensify, my flesh in sync with the throes of shedding skin, scale-for-scale, eye-for-inquisition, allowance & vindication

The snake entwines me, slowly climbing a coil of limbs and body, taking hold of my long forsaken being, and devouring my pneuma with compassionate precision, never aware of how restrained was my tongue, to speak of the pine

I vanish in the brilliance of that sun, particulates of life energy and an unspoken love, the hounds retreat to muddied underworlds, sinking deep in their own fall, never getting the better, never dictating how I know, I died

The premonitions of others in their glassine spheres, gives room in my mouth for the corvids to shatter the silence, aware of the absence, they stuff me full with borrowed souls, making a vessel of Pandora’s curiosity out of my sentient corpse

E.A. O'Connell. September 2019