Oddlands Magazine: Armaros - The Cursed One by Jacqueline West
He’ll always have the scars.
However long he stays, pouring wine
into glasses, brushing the coalescent sweat
of tumblers away with a barroom cloth,
they will remain just as they were
when first he tasted the grapes of Judah.
They’ve grown fainter with the centuries,
though it may be a trick of his desire
that the slashes deep in each shoulder blade
seem to have softened, smoothed, or changed at all
against the skin that never changes.
Sometimes, locking up the bar,
he feels the short temptation to lift his arms,
follow the bat that plunges through the street lamp’s mist
of fragile wings. The elegant arc of a swallow,
the fall of one loose paper from an upper floor -
these things dive into his dreams.
He wakes, muscles clenched, body taut
with the force of its imagined lift through the air,
breaking free of the laws of the earth.
Still he feels their serrations’ ghosts
fluttering in each breeze; their missing weight.
