Cauldron Anthology Issue 3: Year 1 Collection Cauldron Anthology Year One Issue FINAL 1.17.18 | Page 29

Her gorgon’s gaze is a razor –
silhouettes of stone are caged by her stare, fingers curled into claws.
Her fury is aloof and righteous, inching up humanity’s limbs like the fingerprints
of a tentative frost.
Her snakes writhe with restlessness,
cupping her earlobes and encircling her neck and gloving her wrists like bandages.
Her poison seeps from the scaled armor of her fissured skin,
the fruit of my self-imposed isolation sizzling on the palms of their feet
and belying the truth that she is
judgmental and cold and preciously lonely.
Her feet are bare and ringed with mud,
a souvenir of forays into the wild’s knotted limbs and the winding mazes
of the civilized.
Her wings are a film of spongy filigree, fragile and brittle and
veined with her blood,
but she still launches herself toward the winking stars
with the thoughtlessness characteristic of the naïve and the young.
Her breaths are cradled by frantic puffs
and her pulse is an anchoring throb of reality, quivering against her gilded ribcage.
She flings her arms and loops her wrists and titters hysterically,
gleeful in Earth’s relinquished grasp.
She dances and coils and pierces the night with her fingers
mischievous and giggling and rebelliously somber.
She is mercurial and mythical and mined,
and she has had enough of faeries and tales.