XIV

Major Arcana

Fool,

Fool,

Fool.

Your Name. Carved into wax in lieu of bone.

Three hundred and sixty repetitions.

A chant, a wound, a hex.

I watch the flame swallow each syllable,

Letters blistering before bloom.

I am limerence. Raw-palmed and reaching,

Girl at the threshold, drunk on delirium,

Whispering open, open, open, to the wood.

As if devotion has ever been enough.

My voice scrapes, raw, like a breeze through branches.

I drag my nails against splintered skin,

Digging for something that will give,

It groans, but will not yield. Solid dead thing.

Bound by the sticky purgatory of anticipation,

I kneel in the absence of your hands.

Worship the spaces where they should be.

Press my forehead, pyric, to the threshold.

Sweet Summer Child, the glass chides me.

As if the sun hasn’t already burned thought me.

As if I do not spit ash when I say your name.

As if this fever does not clot thick in my veins.

This is something I cannot sweat out.

Fingers convulsing with every breath,

A body possessed, heaving, drenched beneath

Dreor ferrum, driven marrow-deep.

My jaw is aching.

I know this cliff’s edge by heart.

I have mapped ventricles in the dark, pressing moss and root.

You lace cold fingers through my hair,

Chambers whisper faith, whisper hope, whisper jump.

Because Icarus was not warned, he was dared.

Because wax melts against the mouth of a starving Sun.

Because I was promised wings,

And I do not care that they will burn.

Until I fall,

and call it flight.

Dorothea Blythe