There's a song in your lung and a dream in your eye. (Perse)

[perse]

i wanted pomegranates— i wanted darkness— i wanted him. She had not known, when He had first arrived. She’d been a child, innocent, stupid, and He had taken her as Cordis screamed on. But He had taught her, soon enough – had taught her things she had no words for, the exquisite beauty in her breakdown, her remaking. (Did He teach her to love the pain, or had it always been that way? She can no longer remember.) Her eyes trace the mare’s cracks, greedy. She reads them like it’s a message to her, like she is some cryptogram that can be deciphered. But there is no rhythm or rhyme to the patterning, only spider-web cracks, an explosion. She wonders how He did it. Wonders if she liked it. “You don’t look new,” she says. She does not mean to be cruel – she is a species apart, all her conversations for years were with Him, and they were always hot with cruelty. “Joscelin,” she repeats the name. It’s odd but there’s a vibrancy to it. “What happened?” she asks, wanting the story, the message that she cannot read in the mare’s fractured skin. p e r s e ------------------------------cordis x spyndle