Seed Our Marrow with Glass

By Mike Allen and S. Brackett Robertson

I can feel your spine in mine,

a slim length of iron swathed with bone.

My eyes are yours, no longer shutting out light,

folding open to release

the humidity that builds within me.

I exhale the perfume of your flowers.

You weren’t assembled from struts

and bolts and panels, you sprouted.

When I found you, you were small,

shimmering, a puffball but all angles,

slender frames and translucent glass.

You couldn’t be poisonous, I reasoned.

Not to the touch.

(How foolish I was, to discount you based on beauty.

You and I may be small, delicate

but we are sharp and full of edges.)

You entered my bloodstream then, I think,

working your way to the center

where you could spread out, travel beyond my borders,

add your shards to my skin.

You target those who tear the roots from earth

and choke the planet.

I don’t blame you

I’d slice bigots if I could

maybe I should use my newly sharpened skin

to cut my enemies.

Perhaps we can shed seeds, spread spores,

break ourselves to pieces and plant the grafts,

let others pluck our tiny beauties

and sprout our spines in theirs,

turn this symbiosis into the roots of movement.

*

S. Brackett Robertson lives near many bodies of water, while Mike Allen dwells among forested mountains. Brackett‘s work has previously appeared in Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Inkscrawl, and Stone Telling. Mike’s stories have appeared most recently in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Transmissions from Punktown, Pluto in Furs and Nowhereville: Weird Is Other People. His previous poems written with Brackett have turned up in Not One of Us and Spectral Realms. Brackett enjoys museums and math and occasionally tweets at @sbrackettr. Mike lives every day like it’s Halloween. You can follow his adventures as a writer at descentintolight.com, as an editor at mythicdelirium.com, and as both on Twitter at @mythicdelirium.