Smoke

Kat Koorey

First published in Winter, 2009, Volume 6, Issue 3, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

When I first met Lizzie, she had the look of other lives lived within this lifetime and without; she had wild west eyes with spurs; she was a fisherman with fished-out hands. 

Traveling the sea, she saw; traveling the land, she landed, and she docked in a cave seeking shelter from the Storm. Out of the darkness all around her, she added that which was within her, until it merged among the shadows, taking shape and form from madness and echoing it as deed. 

She’s a huntress after souls; her weapon is her need. Her mind writes in invisible ink, her eyes hint at the code. There is smoke upon the wind, it is her thoughts drifting by- each bit of smoke is a piece of her essence. 

Sometimes a scent can tell more than the eye can miss and what has happened is now, not what it was. It was conceived of the mating of love and of pain, the shocking aftermath of peeking into Pandora’s box.

She has recognized blackness woe, appreciates the small light growing louder, growing inward, that illuminates passageways and secret tunnels of her heart, guiding the search past death, into re-life.

She has many names, each one a life lived. So many have slipped by, escaped uncaught by her net, falling free-form out of her orbit, safe from her lazy lure. Her secret smile holds the knowledge of her power, of what she is capable of, and her hard wisdom is the restraint; is the only thing protecting the world from her burning it down