Poetry by Ashley Thornton

Edited by Alexandra Eloise Kogan

Comrades, friends, it is time to take up arms against the forest, with all its creatures of predatory contempt, hungry to fill the woodlands with darkness until it spills, heedless, over.

The stars fall out, and the adrenaline dreams, the patchwork identity seams, all of it makes up the same shade of black, that jet black of a witch hat.

The forest with its angry trees and comatose bees, apples rotting and falling like a dress slipping off, it takes one to know one – or three, should I say, repulsed towards jinxing myself.

Smite and smote, set the tallest trees alight. It was worth putting up a fight once upon a time, but this is a fairy tale for the adult world, one where happy ever afters look different, a queen dying in her hive.

In this world, everything is black and white. The gray is all erased.

A case of feverish pride spreads its infection through my fingers – it’s in my mind, the way I write, why I do all of this. For you, vile creatures. Evil comes in sets of three.

For taking away my happiness, damned forest. For eating up my hope, you hungry idiotic rat! For filling me with an all-encompassing anger unlike any felt before, for eating up the seeds, extinguishing the core.

The bees were always going to die. The bees are now dying. The bees will be dead by the time this reaches you. And, they fill my brain. They’re all I can hear. So, I cover my shoulders with a shawl, my mouth with a dirt-caked hand, desperate to keep warm in this cold. But I still see them when I close my eyes. They look more alive then.

I say it once, I say it twice. 

I pray a third time that it will be true.

That one day, once the Black Forest Cake has been eaten, I will be happy. And, if that happens, I will have myself to blame.