A/N: Written for the Poetry Craze's Musical Muses challenge and HPFC's Poetry Quotes and Numbers Challenge. Inspired by Kanye West's "Blame Game" and the following quote from Maya Angelou: "The dread of futility has been my life-long plague." Bellatrix/Rodolphus.


Erasing One Another

Another bouquet of daisies
is wilting in the trash.
He buys her flowers too unlike her,
too gentle and harmless;
he doesn't like the ones with thorns.

"Why the fuck would I want these?"
He doesn't answer,
instead picking up the flowers
one by one
cutting their stems,
placing them into vases,
the glass ones his mother gave.
Meticulous, banal.
Rodolphus disgusts her.

She's afraid of uselessness,
of pretty flowers dying on kitchen counters.
of trying and failing
of blood without pain.
When God made her
he twisted her out of hot steel
and dropped her straight into Hell.
Bellatrix was held together by thorns and hemlock,
but he still insisted on buying her daisies.