Why Is Love Not Enough To Keep Someone Here,

Let her down softly, I say. Let her down softly. The little girl that lives in me enduring this world confined by rancor deserves a gentle bed to die in.

It hurts me, the rust. The moving water is both a curse and a blessing, I know it rusts my chainmail further but my skin is dying for the tips of its rushing fingers. My leg has been shattered beneath this fountain statue for nearly seven days. I cannot stand, I cannot move but inches left and right in its basin. How horrible a way to die in war, by a stone man, in an iron casket. Though if a living man had struck me down, I’d say the very same.

—a solider named Feo

A sudden calm washed over me

I felt no need to rush

To the finish line, to the next milestone, to anything ever again

My heart quieted for the first time in a long time

And beat gently in my chest, the way a child’s hand is held by her mother’s.

I don’t mind when her leather jacket burns my finger tips, that’s just the summer sun gettin’ jealous of us making love in this old red truck. A lick of hell on the way to heaven don’t scare me. Only being without her does.

-Confessions of a Southern Belle

They say a burnt child loves the fire; a drowned woman, too, loves the sea. And even more so the siren that dragged her to the bottom of it.

Twilight miss me when I’m gone, bleed my shadow ‘til it’s grown.

Light don’t follow where I go, my face anew you’ll never know.

In twilight hours, when her day’s thoughts drift heavenly with the receding tide, and fears and doubts rescind, she thinks of her. Her head wet from the sea dampening her pant legs, resting in her lap as a black pearl. She runs her fingers through her short black hair and wonders how it rises underwater, if she could ever see it for herself without drowning. Salt and iron prick her nose. The siren opens her eyes and the moment she looks at her with a tenderness so palpable, her image disappears. Her lap lay empty. The sailor girl’s mind too shy to peer at even the idea of her so flagrantly. She hears the creaking of the floor boards, and inhales the lantern oil burning, and is brought back to dry reality. Skin itching for the sand in the ocean shallow.

The Wolf

Most are familiar with the story of the wolf in sheep’s clothing: The sly predator posing as prey to descend on the flock and eat them as they are none the wiser. But the story is remembered all wrong, the wolf didn’t have to wear sheep’s clothes at all. He stood before them as a wolf, with claws pointed, canines jutted, and eyes round in their deep, black middles, and simply said, “You are wolves, too. Wolves are better than sheep. Stronger than sheep. You are not sheep.”

Foolishly, they agreed. “I am better than the others, so I must be a wolf,” they thought. And so the wolf ate the sheep, one by one. Where normally they herded together and protected each other, they stood idly, wrongfully unafraid. They had forgotten that what hurts one of them, hurts all of them. They preferred to be better, to think they were wolves, and wolves don’t eat other wolves—only the less than, only the sheep.

And what do you think happened, as the last sheep stood in the glade, and the wolf approached him with grin bloodied and eager? “My brother,” the sheep said smugly, a moment before he was eaten alive.

What is left for me, impaled on the hills I’ve chosen to die on.

There was a worse fate than death, I found, as the god I once worshipped laid his hands on my very soul.

To be unmade.