She watches from below the surface of the pond
as constellations dance in the unreachable sky.
The cavorting moon kicks her body until it aches with inky bruises.
A frown ripples her tranquil features
into a rictus of fathomless agony.
Her tears drift into the murk,
congealing with the slime of the congers into a film of scum and shame.

She retreats into the safety of the depths,
Letting suicidal jetsam choke her vision
so that she can ignore the apathetic glare of the cosmos.
But the skin pooling above her punctures beneath its crushing pressure,
Lambent blood spills across her wet cheeks like white oil,
And staring through the centre of the wounds,
the amorphous eyes of the stars deliver cold judgement:

Naked. But Defiant.

The potency in their glare pushes her feet down to the bottom,
and she decides,
finally,
that before she drowns,
she’ll spit in the eyes of her beholder first.
She inhales a mouthful of rancid brine.
She wills her weak legs to thrash,
defiance upsurges her nakedness to shatter the surface;

And the shock of breathing unsoiled air floods her lungs. 

The moon acknowledges her with a luminous pirouette
and she is stripped of the water’s filth by her own dewy tears.
She spits her mouthful of bile back into the pond,
watching as it sinks beneath
the frothed distortions of possibility.

Featured Image Credit: Engin Akyurt / Pexels

shaunjmclaren92

Hi, I am a burgeoning gothic scholar and writer with an appreciation for the fantastical, sinister and depressing. My prose and poetry tends to focus on expressing an optimistic perspective on emotional turmoil with the cold cynicism typical of a socially akward and existentially weary Scotsman. My research focus is weird literarue and existential philosopy, particularly nihilism. I am currently studying MRes Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling where I also achieved BA Hons in English Literature and Philosophy and am literature editor at The Mourning Paper magazine.