The Wedding
I am wedded to myself in a ceremony of close loneliness
The dress enclosed around my body like a funeral shroud
My skin oiled and embalmed with herbs and flowers
My hair twisted in ribbons and bells
I walked down to the altar with candles dripping wax
Illuminated, I spoke through the lips of a wholeness
Which cracks the mirrors that bent me into many selves
All the girls staring at each other in their multitudes
The ceremony spoken with tongues of romance
But some selves deserve each other more than others
One by one the reflections vanish in communion
And one woman stands breathing more easily and more lost
The dress enclosed around my body like a funeral shroud
My skin oiled and embalmed with herbs and flowers
My hair twisted in ribbons and bells
I walked down to the altar with candles dripping wax
Illuminated, I spoke through the lips of a wholeness
Which cracks the mirrors that bent me into many selves
All the girls staring at each other in their multitudes
The ceremony spoken with tongues of romance
But some selves deserve each other more than others
One by one the reflections vanish in communion
And one woman stands breathing more easily and more lost
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Skeletons
She used to collect skeletons. Gently sewing the bones back together with thread. She was a god of the dead recreating the bones of life without the breathing. She would hang the skeletons as decorations on the walls of her room as if they were dream catchers that would keep her safe from her nightmares. And they did keep her safe even though they reflected the moonlight in such a way that they seemed like haunted ghosts. She didn’t mind because that was the time her skeletons were most alive and she loved them even more for their light and their shadows. She used to read the bones. Those pieces that couldn’t fit in the whole became part of her bag of prophecies. Tumbling them onto the cloth so they wouldn’t break. Fragility has always been a way to tell the future. So I came to her because I didn’t trust my own bones. I threw my own bones to the ground to see if the future could become real for me. It never did even with the pain. So I came to her, pleading with her to disregard the flesh on my hands and the skin on my back. Think of me like a skeleton, I begged. Sew me together even though I can still breathe. Hang me as a decoration on the wall. Read my bones. But she turned me away for I was no use to her. Prophecies cannot come from the living. Dream catchers only exist with the dead. She told me that my desire for answers was too full of flesh and that uncertainty is the debt of the breathing. But even more so when I am most alive I don’t glow in the moonlight. My light and shadows are not as lovable.
Bio
Chariklia Martalas is a Philosophy, Politics, English and History graduate from the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her work has been featured in Rigwelter Press, Isacoustic, The Raw Art Review, Loch Raven Review, Bending Genres, Drunk Monkeys and the undergraduate literary journal The Foundationalist, among others. Her work is forthcoming in Dear Damsels, Bewildering Stories and Sabr Literary Magazine.