by S. Swea
I give it two days
until they find the body beneath the bed,
toes sticking out over lush carpet.
Rigor mortis already set in;
cold, but flesh still unspoiled.
Untouchable even to flies.
Or maybe it will be a week
over which they will continue to place
their slippers by the door and shuffle in,
unconscious of their own unwelcome.
(And the body will croon,
sing its sad song.
A rhyme with no rhythm
which goes on and on.
This discordant melody, this dissonance
of riddles, revisited so many times
that it becomes a reverb.
A lie not snuffed in the cradle trails one
to their grave.)
Maybe by a fortnight it will start to stink,
and they will send the dog in
to search for a rat, perhaps,
or at least its bones. God knows what
the cat dragged in. God knows what he
scratched out when he branded me
body, branded me believably woman,
the thing under the bed
which talks in its sleep and turns black and blue.
Unrecognisable even to flesh-and-blood.
Three weeks, then.
That should be more than enough
to fish me from formlessness, find
the box I crawled out from
and nail it shut for good.
(Ignore the scratching.
I wore my fingernails too short in life,
too blunt
to do me any good after, anyway.)
A month, and the body will disappear
back to whence it came.
Knob broken away in its hand but still
rattling like a snake, the one
which bit down on its own tongue
rather than poison its family’s
good face.
That is all I will give
–to them, and to me.
One month a year,
then the body folds itself away.