Audio version

Take the glamour off

Chipped nails,

Cracked coffin lid

I am done with grave-digging

It is finished

He told me there was no going back

If nothing else, I believe what I see

I’ll be your witness

If you make me a reliable one

Now the woman

The sinful one,

Caught in the act

I see the fault-lines slicing her

Into pieces of you, him, them

Hoard of voices bellowing

Warning

She’s a dangerous one

Marked by her desire. You keep away

Cats in heat have nothing on

Her inescapable hunger

Teeth within heart-finger-mesh

She is a net that will swallow you whole and spit out fragments

Owl-coughing wing-swoop death

And lonely

Like the lynx,

Solitary and content to pad the echoing snow-killed slopes

And never lonely

She is a heath-wren in spring

And the honey-bracelet myrtle-leaf

The dagger-tip Hakea pointing outward, and to the sky

She killed me and now I unearth from

My ashes and rain-soaked fields

Repentance

Fire baptism branding

Bark scorch-marks and blackened skin

Survival of the fittest,

The unchosen chance of the leeward

He said go

I am going.