What stirs inside

By Jon von Nottingham

The Humdrum Pantomime leans
like a granite dam against
the floodwater calamity
that culminates in me.

When the rains came
the repugnancy of death
was borne to my lips again;
Stale soap and salty shit.

Nine months is enough
to hurl life into winter,
but not enough to erase
the taste of Alexa,
euthanized
like a mangled horse.

Six years old,
and stolen from the night,
with foamy bubbles
blistering from her nostrils
because I tried,
God, did I try
to force life back into
my sweet dead child.

The pantomime grows weary,
and what stirs inside
is thirty-three years of
youth swallowed whole by
incessant tempests swirling
into one violent surge
of icy jaws, crazed to the brim
with nothing left on her mind
but the worst kind of revenge.