Skin

I

She wants her skin back, her wrinkled rough rhino skin,
not this skin so fragile and tight.
She wants transformation, water hardening into ice,
the pale brittle blue of a girl's mouth.
She is so cold, she wants grasses brimming with heat.
Her horn would shatter the frozen lake, shivering with cracks.

Another girl stares at her arm spider webbed with cuts,
the razor once moon cold now warm with blood,
pain so deeply buried blooms like red poppies.
She shudders. She is so cold. This blood did not taste like wine.
But it was warm on her tongue.

Even with twenty mattresses fat with swan feathers,
the princess felt the pebble, bruises surfacing
like a body when the ice finally melts.
So the princess drinks wine ember red until she free falls into sleep,
and dreams she is not a princess,
pain fading like cloth left too long in the light.
The frozen girl can now stare into the sun without blinking



II



They tethered her to the stake, piled dried branches around her,
no milky green sap. The sun had eaten it.
An angel etched visions on her skin, her wings hissing,
of a girl who was once a rhino, a girl whose arms are fields of poppies,
a princess who falls asleep each night,
wine pooling in her mouth and blood.
Eve did not eat an apple, she ate a pomegranate,
dense with juice, knowing and pain,
her mouth forever the purple red of a dusk sky, the day ending.
"You will be a sun," the angel told her.
She will be, flames lapping against her feet,
her eyes unblinking and startled as the world loosens its hold.





Copyrighted Kay Sundstrom 12/2011