Cinder

Poetry and art by Brianna Bullivant

limbs like spider’s legs hands, like a grandmother’s that have been s t r e t c h e d lines that began in youth twirled outwards at first then found their way back in, to crease fingers like a piano -ist tightly packed keys skin woven into clothes a spinal zip with a curved stitch to her side

she was forged one depth greater than us in a chasm of salt and ash and burning tastebuds her first memory: being squashed under a cooing meteor

she grew one level down from the sticky, bright substance of

devotion

in the pit where her eyes were made she looked up at the falling soil — damp with bodily passion — cruel to her unsoftened iris

so they glazed over with cement, until no salt sprang from muscle until she learned no master but fire

for it was hot in the crater but not hot enough

unearthing herself anew; a femme fatale – fatal to who? there is a body at the bottom of the staircase but she does not materialise at the top, like a soap operan widow she is already there, beside it beside ghostly remorse a shadow of a self that might feel like a silhouette retreating in dances and ripples

they used to marvel at the things her hands could do: puppetry, and making a prism into her mind but being known is a mortal desire and not one she ever learnt

dormant now, she is in front of a volcano uncurling: the warmth is better than anything to her