Lizzy Burnam 🐞

They say it got all stopped up 
in her lungs like influenza, 
the streets of her subconscious 
alight with alarm after alarm. 
In the morning, she set a cup of acid out
to drown the fruit flies, 
but at night she left the boxelder bugs alone. 
Her mother taught her 
how to hunt this way, a woman’s way, 
cloaked in fever dreams, 
counting coins like ticks of clocks 
til grim the so-called reaper comes
(that campy idol no more frightening
than a worm). “We’re all just 
frogs in water,” she used to say, 
in a voice so loudly sweet 
you couldn’t hear the devil speak, 
not even if he howled. 
“One day they’ll put you down 
like an old broken horse 
and weave your stolen blood 
into garnet and gold.” 
They say she had this secret 
obsession with the branding iron, 
painted spots of mud on her face 
like a cow and sold her soul. 
Royal, brutal, solitary: a special kind
of boundlessness that festers as it grows. 
“Pay no matter to these idle hands, 
this idle mind,” she used to say, 
“for I am a mouth that bites!” 
The night she left, they say 
she dusted off her own silhouette, 
plucked it delicate as cobwebs 
from where it stuck to her cheekbones,  
and as she walked away, 
her body flashed like lightning 
among the blackened sheets of rain.