Spell
Unlikely find in a thrift store’s back bin:
linen sheets that when washed and fitted
to my bed, felt so light I slept in them
as though I had become a gauzy net of spun flax
woven to so delicate a mesh that the weight
of every woe that had befallen me
had somehow fallen through me, dropped away
from me, magically, and none of it mattered.
I tell you this was fairy tale stuff.
I had no ragged edges whipstitched into worms.
No scars, no patches, scorch marks, burns.
I was part of everything, apart from nothing.
Yet I woke afraid. Now, what was I to do,
walk out into the world without my tragedies,
without my griefs and grievances packed
into the long, drawn-out shadow I’d dragged
as ballast behind me oh-so-valiantly for years?
Well, no need to worry: spells
don’t last. Their beauty’s in their brevity.
But sometimes, I can conjure this one back,
when sheets are freshly washed and smoothed
across the bed— I close my eyes, lie lightly
in the weave, and for a moment, I become a thousand
sky-blue blossoms floating in a field of flax,
unthreshed, unbroken, and unspun.
