SandScript 2023 [Digital Exclusive]

Also Forever Waiting for Spring
Ash Hooke
I mark my existence in crows;
Counting those that fly
And those that feast,
Startling in peripheral,
Darkening my vision.
How many makes a murder?
Sometimes I am lost
In their wondrous flight;
Their blue blackness,
Shining eyes.
Sharpened beaks and feet.
Sometimes I am the meat.
My own harbingers,
Heralding these underworlds
That reside within.
Only black birds shelter in hell.
Twentyfivethousandyearlongmoments
Lived in fog and blood
Ravens circling for flesh
Collecting my shiny bits as they slipped
From wounded
Skin split beneath barbed-word bindings,
His and theirs.
Synapses bloom, overgrown by
Thickets of pomegranates
Hooked through
The softest parts of my brain.
Thorny vines
Finding footsteps set in
Trauma’s magma,
Death’s birds picking at
Anything left.
Crying is of no consequence.
My Ceres lost to a labyrinth
Herself.
And
Even though I sit
Inside my one fifth freedom.
Hell squats too deep
At the end of a nightmare path
I walk on my fists.
And still
The crows circle.
Persephone’s spring
Elusive as a flock of
Doves.
Force-fed bushels;
Choked into silence, whole fruit
Swallowed
To ensure eternal
Doom.
Crimson seeds settling, until
215