Reveries of Heresy

they worship aesthetic transformation— a  Princess Diaries  reveal: frizzy mop, smudged glasses tamed and slicked into silky crown, painted eye frames. the ugly duckling blooming into swan. but what if the swan was always her beginning— unpolished, unbidden? at the irony, my frayed eyes can’t help but sigh— don’t they realise the ugly duckling was the swan, all along? in her bold, brash,  waddling defiance , in her wisdom, her weight, her raw breath—unravelled, unlaced. but they inscribed control under the mask of evolution. an imposed metamorphosis mistold as becoming — a chrysalis carved to  constrain , not to release. to be loved, she blurred her silhouette, whitewashed into a filtered mirage, a polished v ase—admired by all, but estranged from her own  wellspring . to be seen, she had to vanish— isn’t that the softest violence of the ugly duckling’s fate?

In the abattoir’s chambers, wild bay horses splayed on metal benches, eviscerated innards blooming with maggots— purified into white paste, rammed through sieve. The scrawny foreman collects it in a scarlet bucket, devours me with his eyes as he slurps the serpentine offal— spoilt, unflinching. Below, Kronos gorges pain, swollen with lust, leering. Above, Wisdom dwells between  the living and the dead. ——— My face, a cartographer of trauma manifest: nodules brewing under the surface, rising up the middle-left arc, from chin to nose to eye— screams smoulder in the womb’s hush, psyche smashes glass— relentless, to break free. Just when a brute latches onto my core, I burst forth through a narrow gape. The shards of window glass pierce my belly as I writhe loose— the price of deliverance, a rite of passage to unleash the flaxen-haired girl, barefoot, linen-clad. ——— The abyss beckons. The great white shark, the colossal Stygian jellyfish— hunt me endlessly in the inky underworld. The ...