Louise Mather
Your mouth is snarled
consoling blood
in your teeth –
eyes less tender
yet somehow holy,
dark night for prey
if I had not known
or I did, where
was the threshold –
the moon held up high
or fallen away,
if I followed you
through the wilderness,
or to keep running,
lying here with death
slowly, quietly –
I think of your throat
roots burrowed,
prised apart by a blade
blooming red haloes
to scratch my tongue.
***
Louise Mather is a writer from Northern England and founding editor of Acropolis Journal. Nominated Best of the Net 2021, and a finalist in the Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize, her work is published in various print and online literary journals. Her debut pamphlet The Dredging of Rituals is out with Alien Buddha Press, 2021. She writes about ancestry, rituals, endometriosis, fatigue and mental health. Twitter @lm2020uk.