A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, c4 - poetry collection centered around a specific character
Faces of the Witch
1. Lion
He is the child they don't want to exist.
He is the child they tuck away into corners and then tuck those corners in so one will have to lift the tablecloth and then smooth it out and then shine a torch-light and not just that pretty chandelier that dangles from the ceiling before they can see the stain that is him and then they'll cringe away. It's the sort of stain that'll be there no matter how much they polish the wood and lather it in paint and varnish, once they see it they'll know and they'll never forget. It'll be a burn, a scar that never goes away, a birthmark, a tattoo that marks them, some psychic link –
But he is too young to do a thing.
He can't dance with the shadows until their embraces
smother him and he can't scurry about the edges
out of sight where if he is seen he's just a floating scotoma that heralds the approaching migraine except the migraine never comes – but the migraine will come because he's the cat in the bag,
the skeleton in the closet
And skeletons fall out of closets,
Cat claws tear through water skins
and the truth tumbles out
Out out out like sand in a broken time glass and it's exactly like sand from a broken time glass and the time glass has broken because the time for all these secrets has run out. The sand spirals into the ocean and is swept away before they can make any semblance of a shore, a beach. There isn't enough blood to quell the volcano's heart and there isn't enough time left to pad on the covers and tape them down so that fateful strand of stray wind won't knock them off and expose them and burn that brand into everyone's hearts and minds in such a way so that it can't be covered nor forgotten again
And like the blood in a severed artery
he gushes out with the truth
and splashes on the rocks, like the foam
of that sand mixed with the sea that eternally drowns, eternally dances,
eternally drowns.