#li north

[stormsought]

To Kali Maa

Fiercest, most resplendent - 

I worship you with middle fingers, 

and every second I’m meant to kneel. 

I‌ walk the blade of your ram dao. 

You, deep blue devi, 

gilt goddess, 

crucible of all that is crushing. 

I am but a drop of your wrath, 

rhapsodical and without mercy. 

Death even of death. 

Slayer of ignorance, 

I keep your image bright 

in catcall curses.

[stormsought]

Ode to Oranges

Winter slice screwdriver, 

groves and groves along the side of the highway, 

fighting sunstroke in the sand. 

Bitter seed crush. Half moons of marrow under nails. 

Once, dizzy with miasma, my mother 

told me, ‘eat an orange’. I ate a whole bag. 

Saintly citrus, pull the poison from the blood. 

Brazier bright drops, 

raveled vow,

observance more holy than sacrament. 

Sweet as birch bark ghosts. 

I weigh you in my hand. 

[stormsought]

我旳

It’s getting cold and I just want କାଞ୍ଜି, 

but the place I grew up in is gone. 

I was named for annihilation, काली, 

from the Samskrtam for the blackness before creation. 

There is too much time in me, 

too much blood of the Mór-Rígghain, 

too much blood of the aureoled Nāga. 

The hunger of Apophis or Fenrir — 

I’ve eaten crocodile and lunar cakes, 

and I’m coming for the sun next, 

red as the silk road — 

kɑ:, I say, like Khan, and they flinch, 

my tongue the sword of Damocles, 

throat speckled like foxglove, 

eyes burning like Гоργώv ichor — 

don’t letch at me, you contemptable fuck. 

[stormsought]

I do not recognize myself, all slender skeleton, fine bones strung on wire, like a classroom prop. I have been gutted, but that is only the start. I am parched earth. I am barren fields. I cannot even dream of plenty. In my sleep I grasp at the barest scraps of nourishment. I am empty winter creek bed. I am ground that gives up nothing.

Famine, by Li North

[stormsought]

The Wire Mother

Cruelty demands forgiveness, 

but my soul is the gordian knot, 

my longing traitorous. No one 

could choose to starve. I see 

something soft and I recoil.

[stormsought]

November

Every winter is the worst of my life.

Do you understand this?

I‌ reach for the light and get frost burn. 

Where is the god of the hearth?‌

Where is the strength of my homeland,

the legacy of my blood?

It’s a kind of abandonment too bitter to describe.

Must everything die at once?‌

There is another surface above this one.

Another pit, stacked like peaches or

matryoshka dolls—

Always heavier snowfall or more bitter wind.

I just want a star that will warm the ground.

[stormsought]

In Penance for Murdered Orchids

Even eternity ends, but it wasn’t supposed to end like this. 

The sun wasn’t made for me. I need something fiercer. 

There is no deciphering the fragile rapture of living things, 

even as I deconstruct my own worship of water. 

Devotion is a desert, and speaks its own language, 

soft meditations on the nature of solitude, surgical. 

Split lipped sidhe, the unforgiveness of land, 

grief reincarnated as a waiting grave. 

I treat time as technicality, 

cracking the sepulcher of sleepless nights 

like communion drywall in places you called home. 

Shrine unsheathed, cordate, a tower of identical dead, 

a murder of moths as omen for the end. 

I know something lived here once.

[stormsought]

Midnight in the Apse

Honeysuckle can grow 

anywhere there’s sun. 

This devotion is holy. 

I love like votives, like 

August shrines and hawthorne altars. 

My hands are heavy enough. 

I can wind as tight       as anyone. 

Stretched this thin, even time corrodes. 

Heavenly chorus immutable,  

a cacophony of ravens. 

Pull the blood from my veins. 

Later, they’ll unbless the ground 

as though gods never walked here.