The girl is banished.
The familial courthouse.
They all scream in a million voices, hammering, the gavel roaming against her.
In unison, not her, shredded young girl, overweight.
The white translucent skin, so soft, mellowed by blows that feel completely endless.
Cloelia. The cold flesh, the blue cobwebs visible, the patterns of old cruelty.
Swimming against the daughter ship.
Waves that do not carry, they sink everything in sight. Mother’s siren song.
Echoing across Cloelia’s mind.
The nails yawing into Cloelia’s shoulderblades, the flesh over her ribs.
The soft womanhood is feasting, the mellowed flesh.
The bones carry the reoccurring stigmata, the hand-me-down souls.
They are spinning their threads along Cloelia’s neck.
The cold pastel colours, no refuge, the immateriality of empathy.
The furniture witnesses, history over history, the hand a whiplash.
Endearing words a felony, a song to trick, the child unloved.
Protect me from my kin, Cloelia stammers into the numb walls.
Their ears open shells incapable of hearing.
The screeching face, a curse, fear makes it mute, the text has lost its matter.
Body to body, that has all the answers.
When mother roams the seas, the beginning of the thread, suicide a threat undone.
Walking past the grave of fathers, reaching out, the grasp, predators hiding behind their
Gravestone names and remembrances. The liars, the believers.
Walking over the graveyard of false and mistreated memories reformed, the blind eye.
Intelligence the child, Cloelia, born with counteractive instincts.
They put it in her body, planted it there, to survive.
Cloelia confronts it many times, looking into a void eye, devoid of empathy.
Her hands becoming the stumbling enemy.
But then she lets the voices die, the voices that are truly dead.
Buried, the rotten flesh, the curse, the echoing malfunctions.
Cloelia is the one that breathes as water hits her head.
The cold white flesh where the waters run, the nails are cut,
The arms in embrace, telling her it’s okay.
“Portrait Of A Young Lady” by Adolphe Piot (1825-1910)
Croque-Melpomene 