You need a rope, they say
(a rope if you can, but a string
or twine will work in a pinch.)
Two candles, one white and one
black, and two photos to match–
One white and one black.
You need one rope, two candles,
(Any color will work in a pinch. Any
Effigy that you may cinder and any long,
thin garrote and any representation
of a neck will work in a pinch) and you
need the hard, vast headboard
of a blackened, blotted sky. Bathe.
(If you are in a pinch you may
blind yourself into moonlessness
and scrape the dirt from your bones
with combs of bristled wire. Wire will do.
Wire will do in a pinch.)
Naked, in the held breath
of the waiting night, you must begin.
Light candles. Cut ligature. Repeat
after them; uncurl their braidings.
Pray, peeled, at the alter of unwant
and let your jaw crack against itself,
Then hear it again, deeper in the woods
And answer to the sound of twigsnap. Hear
yourself unwinding, uncaring yourself
from your ex-lover’s basement bedroom.
I do not much believe in old magic
but I know to unbind at new moon.
I struggle to rise from my reddened
and cold-numb knees. The earth
is newly frozen. Small lances
of frost grasses poke into my skin.
I am atoning on a bed of nails.
The moon is, of course, barely implied.
The rope is a rope and it is black but one
of the candles is something like pinkish
(Blush Bouquet. It was a pinch.)
And when I stand, bare skinned in the dark,
there is a voice that says “Mmmm, pink.”
and now I am glad for the pinch because
the voice is date honey and I am pink.
