The Bride: Haunt of Thieves

Haunt of Thieves

The Bride

All that promised love

The slaughtering of her house perfection

Of its kind

His knowing her this way, exclusion, even language

Only famine, or delirium…newly colored

Then promise was this sheer ravine

That forbade crossing

But by inches

It must be

Toe by toe

One moved or died

Still in shocked faces

Icicles, leaves glacéed in water

Sad lips smiling letters

Making by suggestion words

All these, in powdering vines or

Scuds his boots made in the loam and slime

All intimate, all theirs between them

He and the bride he hadn’t known

Her Stay

(2017, Stephanie Foster)