what can you tell me about the seven deadly sins?
I. luxuria. the light has been coming in for an hour, a pale heat across your shoulders. his face is gentle but your skin remembers his cardinal mouth and his teeth. when he wakes, his fingers will murmur at your nape and down your soft-strung spine, and he’ll say, with the grin of the living, more?
II. gula. there are parties with champagne that tastes as light as laughing; and too much bread and coffee on mornings after; sticky sugared slices of apple pie in a corner cafe; pad thai in hot brown paper, shared while your soul grows fat with love; and the clattering feasts of many brought under one roof: when the evening draws down and the night presses at our windows, we come, we sit, we eat.
III. invidia. the water on the window draws cuneiform glyphs, and you are making coffee and listening to her sing, low and sweet as rain. in a while he will come in, wet and rowdy, and touch her with hands you have failed to hate, and break the pane of this quiet thing—but not yet, not yet.
IV. acedia. you sleep and sleep, and wake with grey head and bones. the day is lead and sickened, and there are shadows on the surface of things. you falter between the hours. it’s a haunt you’ve seen in other faces, before the bearer stows it away, and the words clutter on your tongue—you too?
V. avaritia. —not yet enough of a sunset after rain and saffron-lit pavements, a hundred evening voices, warm hand tugging your hand, a violin played underground for coins, a train-car and the ghosts that faces wear, all the dark and patient streets to your house, a quarter-moon and silvering air, a scarf unwound red in a hallway, perfume faded on wrists, and your fingers in black hair. you don’t know if you’re hollow or heavy with longing. you have always been hungry.
VI. ira. after he hurts her, you take her to the hospital. you take her ten roads home. you bring her books and sweet-williams. you wait. on the sixth day she calls: not enough evidence. her voice is colourless. on the ninth day you see him in a courtyard—you are shouting, and startled to find his blood on your hand. when she asks you about it her mouth lifts, briefly.
VII. superbia. at the end of the year you will go down, through gorse and salt-stiff grasses, to where the sea drags its torn hem over the sand. you are a tall spine and a head that does not bow, and you have seamed with gold the fissures in your heart (that old idol). between waves the water is like glass; you don’t flinch from mirrors. you will go on from there, having armed yourself with brazen love that becomes its own nourishment, unashamed in all your atoms.
snowghoul
jbbartram-illu
theartofmadeline
2087
dededos
germansingergirl
kianamaiart
titsay
