By: Shannon Avery

Just an inch away,
writhing toward me,
my ancestry,
Held distant by the force of my ambition for my first honest caress;
But this unholy disease infests,
So near,
tuckled up to my cells and sinews,
Closer to me than my own will to deny it portage in my sanguine canals.

Far off in some misty before-now,
The hag threw my bones and cast my fate.

Dark Mother of me,
O come feed your theotrope childer—
Too far removed from the wellspring,
The placental font,
To stalk the night on my own.

But close enough to hunger...

With phantom taste of stolen life on my tongue,
Drawing my blood like the moon rules the tides,
I feel the undertow of craving.


This poem will appear in The Queen's Rune and Other Tales of the Sidhe, to be published by Vulgar Marasla Press, early in 2009.