Tag Archives: Louise Mather

I don’t know if the sun is already dead. I remember something about stars, gravity, collapsing into darkness, dying if not already gone.

If this is true, we behold the remnants, syphon them for warmth or light or contortion in the aftermath of destruction, or relative to it, the way I draw up a hill, get older or younger, or my spine shrinks.

I overturn rocks the dark sea at night devours. I hold myself to the floor. I don’t know why. I give up wishing, and if I didn’t speak, or think, how creatures have more wisdom, shriek fear at just the right moment, if that existed, itching the word surrender.

Already, you have taken me, consumed the shattering of my psyche, whatever was left of the glow, you use, picking at it for sustenance, as time drifts, this is how I collapse, or the sun, or stellar evolution, and we are alive and warm or cold and dead or both, feeding off each other, never knowing when to stop.

photo by Dan Cook (via unsplash)

This night is a silk dress –
trembling, it births the snow.
The moon is ascended
from eiders of gothic coal,
wolves bring blood and amber,
gifts they split from the lake
and dragged for days.
Here, pledge your bronzed heart,
for harbingers of chronos –
the body of the blue sun,
dwellings of blossom,
the ocean where you shed
your skin, nocturnal.

photo by Vincent Guth (via unsplash)

content warning: self harm

I showed you the edge
of my thigh where I had first
held blunt
jawed compasses, plum handled
scissors and tinselled
razors loosed from cold
plastic bone.
Under the gloaming, you could dredge
their auras
of roses, leftover imprints, ethereal
cavities, ugly violet
jags and rails
of lines without
anchors. Sometimes I thought
they were remembering forks
from a devil’s bramble
tongue or feline gouged
with a claw that had never known 
its own 
sharpness. I told you how I could measure
time by these marks –
then you bit right there
into the doughy flesh and I hallucinated;
that you were telling me something small like
love, as I finally
fell
into deep, deep
velvet sleep; a fairy tale
in retrograde.

photo by Annie Spratt (unsplash)

she waited for the snow to harbour
bewitched by somnolentia

she ripped ivy with her thumbs
unleashed apple bark

plummeting in ringlets
flecks of lace

she bit the tallow
down to the roots

spat thread and trussed molasses
burnt to the other side

of the candle
larvae

buried long ago
were they humming

molecules
could they be free of convulsions

she asked about the trigger
whether the word

whole

meant archaic
numbness or trauma

she didn’t know where
to put them

returned to the lilac bough
asphyxiated with callous rain

bricked leaves wrenched with gales
nothing if not upended

how could she tell
if they were alive

for the beholder of logic
the delusion of languor

she knew that if she was dead
there could still be a sense

of something other than
stillness

in the debris
as the world continued to move

either way
they would be carried along with it

photo by Halanna Halila (via unsplash)