But they stripped us of our robes, our faces and names until we're but calamities inside loose skins, crumbling and flaking off. And maybe that's why we started to believe that we're the ones who burned in *****, kneeled before the calf, and died in the lion's den.

I. Persephone

Naive girls don't make good lovers
but I will sink into the comfort
of your clementine lips, grazing,
staking claim on my skin —
an offering to your kisses made of molten lead,
oh, how surely, how gently they trail,
like a river following its memory lane.

And yet, I have apologies etched on my skin;
I am a poem that bruises quickly
like petals on the soil.
So much for being the goddess of spring
when all I have are wildflowers
and moans scattered on the sheets of the dusk.

We know naive girls don't make good lovers
so cast me, Hecate, into firelight
where all your daughters burned.
Strip me of this sundress;
my chest was half of Demeter's softness
and half of the underworld's wrath.

And yet, I, too, am made of papercuts
forged to look like carmellia buds
lost and slow dancing in broad daylight,
your hands on my waist —
a quiet breath,
a delicate touch:

such curious ways of coming home.
Naive girls, they don't make good lovers
but I will pick you stray sunlights and goldenrods —
leave them by your bed;
these sheets know that
I belong to no throne.
I belong to no man.

And they say that naive girls don't make good lovers,
but only just;
darling, your walls are an eyewitness
to your gaze and my corruption.

So much for innocence
now neck-deep in mildew and anomalies.
So much for springtime,
its fields, now made
for us coming undone.
And so much for winter, darling —
so much for winter.

It may never come.

i am no longer a girl;
my body has played host
to the fourth of the Fates,
and this is the twilight, unfolding.

the midday has seen clotho, spinning the thread
has seen lachesis measuring it, atropos cutting it.

and here i sit, a figure in the sunset —
a silhouette of a weaver in tattered dress

my heartbeat, a substandard thread,
a mess in my pockets
getting shorter and shorter
with each wound sewn shut

and yet,
a seagull's flap,
a poke of a stick,
and all these stitches come undone.

a cautious breath,
a loosened thread,
and the sunsets learn a new shade of red.

I have mastered the art
of making myself small;
the years have taught me
how to fold myself
step by step,
edge to edge
into pinwheels and paper lilies
mindlessly left in infinitesimal space —
an instinct —
a secret slipping into the unconscious,
left beneath the mattress,
left behind the doors.

The years — they've taught me
how to take my heart out —
take it apart and fold it
into a thousand paper cranes —

all cooped up in my ribs.

Their wings, decaying
with all the wishes
I never allowed myself to make.

Their beaks, pecking on the flowers,
on the wheels,
on my skin:
an obsession, a compulsion,
a ritual for symmetry,

a constant flipping,
a ceaseless folding,

until i am small enough —
insignificant enough to attract no attention,
to remain unseen, unheard,
unnoticed in the room.

And here, in this infinitesimal space
I have mastered the art
of making myself small.

and lately, these poems have become nothing — nothing but just mere spoils of war from inside my head.