Lizzy Burnam 🐞

Who are you when you turn away from me? 
Friend of thieves and hunters, 

guiding light for the heroes in exile,
guiding light for the tangled-in-love. 

For all the oceans you move, 
what still hides in your shadowed craters? 

It can’t all be my fault—the hairless corpses 
and the fluid-filled lungs.

The muses sprung from—your—waves. 
The wolves only howl for you. 

And when the bruise-blind woman 
sleepwalks through the evergreens,

the earthworms tickling her heels, 
the mud-black lock of a man’s hair in her fist, 

she eats your pale fruit and genuflects to—you. 
A lesser light, yet sweeter on the orchids. 

You’re Luna, by the river, mid-spring. 
Selene in the morning, the sky frigid-pink, 

your feeble blue eye still blinking 
on the island-side of—my—horizon, 

as if the future could arrive ahead of schedule. 
Cynthia, the raw-boned slice of you, so thin

the night-flying whip-poor-will
draws silence like a veil over his nest. 

Fire-eater, mother of ash. 
You mark your trails with jasmine,

cast your chimeric torch in the wrong direction, 
and when you turn away, the seer says you bleed. 

Sun-bather, do you burn like me?
Or are you cold like the surface of a mirror?  

Tell me the name your phantom knows. 
Show me your face when you’re not mine, 

alight with stolen afterglow. 
Luna, Selene, Cynthia—an echo by any other name

would still shock your solemn sky. 
But by sin and sage, I’ve learned to pay heed

to the sway in every distant orbit 
and the patient thorn under every rose.