Ephialtes

They came for me at night, while my back was turned and you slept:

those subcutaneous devils you yourself had sown.

They flooded me with seething light and spoke in tongues cut from your own

which had already died in your mouth. In your dreams you twisted and wept

and I couldn’t find the root of my own voice to wake you; they kept

me pinned to the window with my eyes and lips sewn

up against the acts I’d been shown and shown

until the scenes bled together and pooled in the places I had already stepped.

I tried crushing them beneath the heel of my foot.

I tried prising them out from under my skin,

pulling them up from the roots like hairs

until the pain was a chorus ringing in my ears and swelling in my gut.

And still you slept, hiding behind latitudes and the thin

veils of unfamiliar maps. You won’t wake for such nightmares.

Laura Voivodeship writes mainly erasures, sestinas, and odd bits of prose that go nowhere. Her first full-length collection, Redactions, is forthcoming from Stairwell Books in the UK in early 2023.