Tag: wings

Mood: half-anxious, half-resigned | Drinking: dreams

Fear and love sometimes feel the same, like a thousand violent butterflies beating their wings against your stomach, shredding their way out.

Hope, as I’ve said before, is a knife edge. And I am currently quivering with hope and fear. Knives and butterflies.

I think my current state is quite aptly described by the word “anxious”, with a side of “nervous” and a pinch of “fretful” thrown in. But I’m working, oh so hard, to be zen about it. To say, “what will be, will be.” And be ok with that.

It’s just that I don’t know what will be. And in the not-knowing lies the anxiety.

Let me be all cryptic for now. I’ll explain on the other side. Deal?

Until then, a little Kristy Bowen to make us all feel better. Or at least to make me feel better…

fret
by Kristy Bowen

Lets say a woman’s heart
is like a windup bird.
The conservatory filled
with oranges and the cellar
disordered, unstable
with the pull of thieves

gathering outside the windows.
I’ve invented this: the panic,
copper tongued and shaken.
I’m dizzied, dulcet.
A thin layer of graphite
blooming beneath my skin.

And here, my sleight of hand,
my tour de force,
skirts come all undone
and tapping out code beneath
the dressing table. I am
impossibly lovely, impossibly
fixed against the horizon.
Any attempt at flight
ruining all the furniture.

***

-Lo, beating wings and biting nails.