still blooming
poetry by Griffon Kaye
still blooming
the body is both the marble and the blade, the neck and the guillotine, the bread and the knife.
the body is a battleground
frozen in winter, strewn with your casualties: your losses
and traumas held unmoving,
undecaying in the frost
blood from years ago hardened to stone.
the body is the gravestone,
carved into the sum of all your earthly parts,
monument to the space you took up,
sinking heavy with what it leaves unspoken into spring earth.
the body is both the animal and the chain, ravening for survival,
chewing at its bones, empty and cold as the trap,
an ouroboros keeping itself in check.
The body is none of these things, it is the martyr,
stripped down and held hostage to the experience,
still blooming in the weakest sunlight.
tattoos
poetry by Griffon Kaye
tattoos​
lying on the table with february sunlight falling soft and gray through high gothic windows into my eyes, over my body where a wise woman bent and carved roses into my chest, and I thought about blooming in cold dead places and opened up the part of my mind that swallows pain like honey administered between the lips, I soaked it in and thorns sprouted over my white bones- kept wishing I were a smaller scaffold but then, where to find the space for the blossoms? the pain of the needles never reached the point where you stop swallowing the pain and it swallows you instead, where you lose your balance, where you can absorb no more- instead it moved in peace, a thousand inky punctures saying I love you, you are strong. neurotransmitters washing down the line, well-practiced, feeding on the chemical signature of the pain like sustenance.
Griffon Kaye
Griffon Kaye is a night shift lab technician with a BS in Genetics. She lives in Des Moines and moonlights by day as a creative type.