Honor Vincent: No One Ever Saw This Far
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Fox Hell
Consider the chain link fence,
and forget how to expect a future of your body.
Imagine peeling your skin up from your claws to your nape
until you are a hide laid over dust.
Things here burn if you lean on them.
Your mother had a myth about mud and secret doors.
Once, in this season, she buried you so you wouldn’t burn,
and you learned to unmake the ground by worming through it.
A plastic flip flop
was a frightening hot miracle you carried in your teeth.
No one near enough to show what you found out:
how the glittered straps slid down your throat and back up again.
The inventors of the fence
made the impossible sign of loop-locked fingers as explanation.
Your mother had a myth about them, too.
But you forget it in your fear of human hands,
their soft, clutching skin, strong as an extra jaw.
Once
No one ever saw this far.
Grief was something that might walk through your door as
Doom was walking through your neighbor’s,
but both came on quiet feet.
They didn’t always shake my floor and me with it, as they crossed yours
But then, we never used to have lines to tug
to say, yes,
I felt that, too.
Honor Vincent's poetry and stories are published in Strange Horizons, The Ekphrastic Review, Entropy, Neologism, and Nowhere. She's currently writing Andraste, a comic series about Boudicca and her daughters. She's a third generation New Yorker who lives in Brooklyn.
