Lisa Kamolnick
Beneath the Bones
Midwinter’s moon pulls at your hungry places.
The wax-wane wears you down to body senses
bent on comfort—warmth steaming through ice,
promise of spring green nibbles and harvest tables.
Don’t slumber all season starving in dreamtime
mirage. Don’t try to evade old myths, ancient truths—
witches and full moons. Magick spells. Madness.
Trouble is coming. To such depths you will feel this
bone chill and hunger. Wasting away into broomstick.
(Who will feed you if not you?)
Don’t trust a thin woman light as witch-weight, who dances
in the midnight mist, cries out to stars, winnows and wails,
wails like a banshee at a full moon in February.
Don’t look into her emerald eyes or hesitate
at the hiss of her flame-red hair. (She might be you.)
If you must pass her, take extra care—stay to her right—
don’t so much as brush the fringe of her silken cape
or scrape the barest border of her flinty, crescentic
fingernails fashioned for digging into flesh.
Most of all, beware the sky. Don’t elevate your eyes.
Don’t ever stare at Bony Moon, belly empty as a season’s stores,
skin and marrow housing so much hunger you can taste the air—
else you’ll turn to stone, smash to dust, waft up to a waning moon
stripped down to star twinkle streaking across night skies
as the living wait below, below—watch
Winter in the throes of death as Spring awaits a worm.
Poet and photographer Lisa Kamolnick explores humanity, the natural world, and spaces between and beyond. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Abyss & Apex, Slipstream, Emerald Coast Review, Tennessee Voices, Cadence, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and others. Active in Tennessee and Florida poetry communities, she currently serves as Poetry Society of Tennessee President. Connect at lisakamolnick.com.
Banner Art:
Photograph by Melmak, Pixabay, 2016
