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The leaves around her breathe citrus / and dusk. I think of you when the last light / glints off the roof tiles. – Malinda Markham

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You shall be Queen —— an Austrian pawn in Versailles. Let’s not speak of consuming love, my obedient swan; soon will be time for judgment & lies.

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Cornflower satin, heels on parquetry —— she orders nests for her hair to keep skylarking near, wears the clouds on her finger to be swallowed in vapor. His passion grows for libraries & locks; intricacies of cogs & clocks beguile him, but no cock crows among their orange groves. Pile on the gilt, guilt, geld but no pollen from his anther. Seven years of chaste moons, & the sheets are still dry. She would ask him to hold her but doesn’t know where his hands have been.   

Betwixt the banquets & balls, she’s cursed for mounting like a man in buckskin breeches; gossip glitters, then kaleidoscopes, in every mirror. Too many harlequin stairs & wide-open vistas, yet, she cannot awaken her homesick lungs. She compares her life to waves, in opulence & roil, but will never see the sea. 

Send a letter to my mother —— tell her I am trying.


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O grapes & fermentation, bless your rivers filled with blood, dove, & blush. In book of hours & incantations, time unfolds between piping calls of thrush.

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Fireflies over the meadow, soft spangle of tapers, the hem of her chemise catching on reeds —— she carries a small basket of radishes, rubies for shire horses who soft-lip her palm. Here, she runs rose-wild, banishes hard eyes & whalebone stays, her mother’s voice locked in a lacquer box.

Hope-winged & bud-opened, he waits with flasks of wine & stolen figs; his long coat blankets the ground. They speak of amulets & falcons, parlor games & nightingales —— turn yearning’s blue fire into a dreamscape fugue. Notes of jasmine & neroli, far-off troubadours garland the air. Leaning into her, his tongue traces small flowers along her throat.

Send a whisper through the lindens to dispel this tryst.


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No chance remains for this foreigner at court —— where rumor reigns the most scapegoating sport. Her confidants & guards draw close at the palace — spry-teeming seachange: empty-bellied, mouthfuls of malice. 

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The night of rain is unexpected, flint-eyed, & greening —— candlelight silhouettes run on high-ceilinged fear. The wilding roars from chamber to chamber, clamber up pastel walls. She’s barefoot, racing, barely outrunning the metal clamor of blades & pikes. Hecatomb harvest: errant gardeners chopping down hedgerows, the golden orchard bright with blood.

Send compassion to my daughter, she’ll lose her brother next. 


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O Mother, cool Empress, is this what you imagined for your landlocked girl? No peace in the fortress, no rue-weighted bones? I did what was asked, loyal until I left the world.

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On the final morning, her brave face blooms backwards, under the glade where roots embrace silence, forever-hide her display. She woolgathers in her garden, steady steps; the ordered beds are still but strangely broken with lowering furrows of fresh-turned soil. Bound behind her back, the last hand she held was her own —— pale hair shorn close as a lamb’s coat, her crown of lost light. 

Send a wagon to the square & bring my body home.