“There are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals. Types of death you can’t smell.”

-Haruki Murakami

“Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.”

-Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

“To see a landscape as it is[…]”

-Roni Horn

LADY DIONAEA MUSCIPULA

Part I

I had that dream again:

Full moon

Summer’s edge

A watching darkness

Within the summoning woods,

Shrouded in stillness,

Something waits

The midnight air is filled with the 

Murmured whistle of cunning salix tendrils

Those singing saws

Wisping about the windless air

Their sharp, swaying whisper slits through a 

Masterfully woven web of carefully disguised cloak 

Unveiling a majestic, ancient presence

All around, the velvet nightscape darkens with blotches of trees

Spilling out from the wound into the night:

A wine-dark bouquet expanded in ecstasy

The purest gesture of unmediated 

Femininity

The silent, unfurling forest is

Intimately nocturnal 

Filled with secrets that make themselves known to few

A dark deity

Draped in a robe of shadow under a sky thick with stars 

Beneath the perimeter of her enveloping shade

The willows’ inky weep

Heavy with beauty

Dripped

Soaking the unhallowed land with the

Syrupy scent of allure 

Like flies to decay,

The Fascinated swarm

Closer—

Insectile marionettes tugged by strings of 

Lunar pull and strings of 

Desire

Closing the distance between themselves and their demise

The welling moat of dark secretion steams

Its hanging fumes congeal into a honeyed gauze that

Hovers in the area of illusion

Obscuring and falsifying the view beyond

The charmed stand fixated before the forest edge

Catching brief glimpses of beauty and mystery 

Threaded into the dense Beyond—

Swollen with

The glitter of divine knowledge

The power of secrets kept

The confidence of infinite patience

Her false silence deceives

Soothing away any

Lingering apprehension

The bough’s centipedal branches

Beckon

Just a few steps more

Soft wands of willow entrance

Dancing in the moonlit darkness

Fields of eyes fixate as

A seductive shadow of doom is spun

Night—

She wants

And waits

And

Waits

Arching her limbs wider

Casting her shadow further

Anticipating 

Any that 

Foolishly enter her 

Beautiful, but 

Dead, 

End

Reveling in the crescendoing scent of their skin

Part II

At last

With consciousness dimmed

A lone figure wades into the trough of her cold shade

That tripwire where night and forest combine

He douses himself in the ichor and greedily 

Laps the taste of stars

Night’s tide swiftly withdraws

Catch in tow

Closing inward in sanctity and

Lacing cilia shut 

Commencing the ritual of Consumption

The foul lining of her gaping maw

Welcomes with silks of buzzing pain

Smothering the smitten with a thickening darkness that

Radiates from deep within

She sighs satisfaction

Savoring the delicacy with a passionate, teething horror: 

The bliss of Huntress intoxicated with the

Terror of Prey

A throat of cast iron narrows in

Drowning the feverish hope for escape with darkness

Jerks of torment are quickly

Suppressed by the slowness of shock

A deadening silence

Bleeds into panicking consciousness

Unspooling rationality and staining cognizance

Black

The off-gas called Misery seeps into the air

Curdling panic and melting moonlight

Hollowing clouds and eyes alike

She stirs

Sanity flickers in all creatures around her

Mirroring the wavering glow of her cauldron

Thoughts stretch 

And snap

And begin

To

Drip

The willow weeps its

Sapping horror

The juices of the mind

Ooze

The moonlight

Drains into darkness

Her animated potion 

Swells

A drop of agony

A dash of anguish 

A pinch of woe

Love curls up and dies

She casts aside the silhouette of the sacrificial 

Dismissively binding limp shadow to an eternity of oily

Unrest

Forever constricted within the bounds of endless woodland

(Of which is tethered to no geography)

And with nothing to anchor to for grounding

All that remains is the shape of life past:

Empty outlines and

The displacing weight of 

Meaninglessness

The blackened liquid bubbles as she

Bathes him in lunacy

He blankly stares into the substance of which he’s submerged in but is 

Offered no reflection back

The night ripens

Vines of thorned smoke snake from the cauldron

Clawing and twining at the remaining vitals

Depleting blood beads like rubies atop the brewing potion

A boiling, rotting  stench wafts outward as droplets

Monster into beautiful, terrible jewels

Her batch of doom is almost done

Horror heightens as she works

His form collapses into silvery dust atop the

Black treacle murk

The finished elixir knows its maker

Refusing gravity’s laws and instead

Leans unnaturally in a

Dazzling, unleveled fashion as she 

Moves about the pot

Without even a touch, the cauldron overturns with unseen force

A sparkling stream streaks across the terrain, devotedly 

Pooling about her bare feet before disappearing from sight as it

Soaks into her skin and

Rushes upwards through her veins

She’s shining 

She’s blinding

She cracks into a

Slit of morning light—

The edge of a broadening gash

Dawn: the end of Night

Part III

The inky, black forest vanishes in a wink

Evading sunlight’s jabbing spear

The space left behind saturates with the chill of presence unseen

Despite brightening surroundings

The Entranced, released from desire’s grip, topple to the ground,

Staining their dress with the filth of willow’s weep

The spell has broken

And sunlit shards are used to

Cut through the fantasy

While 

Simultaneously slashing the Self:

Protecting sanity with the double edged sword of Forget and Denial

(…So a fool repeats his folly)

They crawl through their incision, returning to the

Rational side of reality—for now 

Her Shades remain though forest unseen, and hastily 

Dispel into disparate entities—

A gravity of avoidance

From sunlight’s growing consciousness

They desperately cling to the nearest occulters,

Matching movements with morphing ebb 

She watches and waits behind her restored guise of void,

Yielding dark and powerful patience while the sky slowly

Tilts from one side to the other

She does not hope for day’s end—

She knows of it 

Alas,

The slipping sun can only hold so long

And Day wilts into Night—

Just a mere blessing in parentheses, a 

Finite escape from 

Night’s inevitable engulf 

A devious dusk begins to seep in

Not quite day and not quite night

Begin mingles with end and

The not dead but not alive

Come out again to prey

Her shadows, unbound from adhesive elusion of sun, 

Melt back into the atmosphere and

Weaken with the rising darkness 

Their once-separate identities dilute as they

Mingle and merge with not only each other—A

Wicked, alien black trickles in from unknown origin

Spoiling them into distorted echoes of victims past, with

Nay a defense to ward against the violation of identity lost

Finally, the last of light drops dead

The sweetness of Night flowers in celebration under the

Pall of moonlit sky as she 

Casts her spell for tonight’s catch

Day’s trick was merely night’s treat

The hunted are haunted once again

It isn’t easy to fall asleep anymore