“I can’t wait,” I tell the water and the ghost of you, your eyes old as a wedding vow. My grin is the moon cut in two, incandescent, victorious. Though your memory connives to deter my decision, I shed this poor human facade. It ribbons from my bones, sheets of tissue and hair dip-dyed in emerald, leather and blue jeans. Underneath, I am joy flensed of your petty conditions: basal, bone-deep, breathless.

Three times you came to the temple.

Three times you paid what you owed.

The rest?

It doesn’t matter except for this:

You lied to me.

You rolled up my skin and locked it into a chest. For safekeeping, you told me, your mouth in my hair. When I stopped looking, you set it all on fire, mixed the ashes with a sip of sweet mead. And I’d cried at its taste and you said I was crazy. There was no salt, no lies, nothing but honey, heady as expensive wine, no life outside of you and I.

I have a cloak again, better than the one you burned.

A stitch of grey mouse fur wreaths my right shoulder; he is too little to give me more. But soon, he’d promised, and I believed him. The trimming is all badger, its span woven from elk. Feathers from a stormcrow, like knife-cuts above my heart. A hellhound’s mane. My mother’s fur, blanched by the years. Souvenirs from a thousand small loves.

The hotel says nothing about my damp attire, the way my hair sticks to my face. Tonight, I will make a bonfire of your gifts. I will drink gin and make haikus of our last conversation. I will wear red. I will climb to the roof and I will rename every star, while Malmo dreams of when its tides seethed with ships.

I will be me again, darling, and you will be nothing.

and in our daughters, we find a voice

My prince kills my sisters before they can come to me, their deaths my bride price, the payment for an unwanted humanity. His fishing ships and his harpooners drive them into the rocks and the salt-whetted cliffs, into the maw of the coral. They chase them with nets and explosives purchased at great expense from China, until there is nowhere for my siblings to go but up, up into the searing blue air.

My sisters die voiceless in a froth of red foam, gasping mouths and gaping eyes, no different from common fish.