StylusLit

March 2024

Back to Issue 15

Frost Flower

By Danah Slade

 

It becomes clear after 

you split at the base

feeling nothing but your own frigidity –

 

how foreign you are.

 

The birds, the bears, even the burrowing worms

(all) have this shared experience, as with your own genus.

 

But you….

against all your cynical servitude –

 

vampiric skin ribboned for the taking, 

withering away at the first display of warmth.

 

You cannot make ‘cataclysm’ feel

as beautiful as it sounds.

 

Though, you can make breaking apart look lovely,

and be fouler for it.

 

The mist enamours you,

epitome of both gentle and smothering.

 

Such is the very lassitude of your longing;

ambiguous, amorphous – twisting into the smallest spaces,

slowing down the busiest streets.

 

Wanting to be more than a mould inducing

Martian. Martian. Martian of a marshland.

 

Wanting to be more than a mask.

Wanting to be damp in all the right ways.

 

Wanting to be someone’s clarity 

and seen-through.