B is for Burkan
When I said, Leave me alone!
and hung up the phone, I didn’t mean it.
You should know better. Nobody wants to be
left in a room, alone with her thoughts.
Don’t you know the story? Once upon a time,
a pretty girl was spurned. Her beloved left her
for another. She woke up the next morning
a grown woman who would never be a bride.
She felt so meanly betrayed, she grew green
wings and flew through the suburbs, rapping
curses on the windows of the yellow nurseries.
Thus wars begin in times of peace.
We cannot live happily together
because love is strife, and we live to fight
each struggling to gain the upper plane.
Rage is singular, plural and a verb.
We roll over and over each other
on the bedrock and carpets of mosses,
defiling the emptiness of spaces.
Prayer is the loveliest daughter of God,
but ours is the intimacy that occurs
between warriors. We love and murder
relentlessly in groves of sacred trees.
You are perfect and stupid. I am violent,
erotic. I long to be plundered, but at night
I embrace nothing: your phantom,
my dreams, shadows of what I have foreseen.
Our love will assume the form of a boy.
Our son will weep for spilled blood and for love.
But I awake every morning, knowing—
My foresight is fiction.
Copyright 2016 | Pet Murmur | by Christine Gardiner
