Emma Cairns Watson
you can break them across your knees, these relics that compose Me. give Me enough gold and I will be, almost, beautiful again. on your knees and only on your knees, pray if you like but this thing will come for you. this thing will come for you, rotator-cuff rotating robotic out of shadow like a clock-knight’s upraised arm forward on its hinges and forward in the last light of the lamps of your eyes. I sit like a dog and I look at you. there is nothing lumbrous in My skeleton. it’s the slabs of salmon muscle, yellow fat that build Me up to meet My own skin. the woman I (loved, was) the patron saint of witches, pigeons, girls who want no children. those who look at Our ashes with other than wonder, I eat. I go in all directions and I smile. you are glad not to see Me without the wonderful skin I wear, glad not to live long enough to learn the way the bones move inside a bear. when I put My skull on your table it bows like the curl of a finger, impatient, drum-drumming your confident glass.
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Emma Cairns Watson recently graduated from Smith College and now lives in California, coordinating university conferences on Egyptology by day and inhaling other people’s poetry by night. She has work in RHINO, Barrelhouse Online, and Ninth Letter, and can be found on Twitter: @ecairnswatson.
