Our Featured folder showcases literature inspired by visual artwork and visual artwork inspired by literature.
Green my Flesh is, Green my Tresses by AzizrianDaoXrak, literature
Literature
Green my Flesh is, Green my Tresses
His is an autumn kiss, wet and smelling of rain
and blackening leaves.
Our dance begins toward evening.
Over me
he is a crouching spider
giving his venom—
silence over my throat,
his gift of drowning.
Green—he wants me green as death,
as the ocean-water,
as his ghostly face raising to the surface.
On the kitchen table,
a vase of flowers like spectral faces.
He is a knife in the skin,
a root in the soil—poltergeist
stealing the color from my eyes
to fill them with his own frozen silver,
leeching the blood from my veins
to give me new ones, green
and brittle as wallpaper.
My body is a flower, feet like petals
and I his stem
The shaman surveyed the city that would be his home for the coming years. The brown walls contrasted the eternally-gray skies. But the people were to be commended for eking out an existence on the unforgiving environment. A few tapestries attempted to contribute color, but were washed out by the mud. Mud covered everything, even the adobe walls. It was a keen irony that the rains which brought cleanliness also churned the filth, if it was possible to clean this city at all. Near as the shaman could tell, much of the mud was caked on.
No one ventured outside to greet him. The guards had allowed him in with only a cursory examination and no to