Going Back

by Leah Bobet

When you go back
It will be naked
Or chained, bones snapped
Or just undone
The garden-variety sort of undone:
The kind that grows in tomato patches
Pulled up mistaken in the canning weeks.

(There is a corpse-detail
on the door in the hedge
bankers impaled on the thorns every night
are cleared by the brownies come morning)

When you go back
You will be old.
You never thought you might grow old
Like into a shirt, or like a weed
A debt-sheet, a child, a silence strained
They do not like things that are old:
Your blind, dark eyes won't find the door.
(Nobody makes you dance to death
nobody makes you cry all night
meatloaf is just as good for you
as the feast-food under the hill)

Push the coats aside;
Dive down the hidey-hole
Whispering harsh and deathwish-soft
I do, I do --
--I do believe in faeries--

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