Poetry by Jasmine Vo

Edited by Shazfa Khatri

She says that shackled inside our consciousness 

Lies the spindly strings connecting our past lives.

She claims to have seen her lifeless body beside an imposing mountain cliff,

That the terror of the fall haunts her closed eyes,

And the sight of peaks so high still stiffen her body.

She warns that reincarnation dreams are no curious thing to trifle with.

I was a spider before I was human to her,

An ugly thing with pregnant eyes, ready to burst with horrifying knowledge. 

She’d watch my long fingers dig deep into piles of tangled jewelry and tattered balls of yarn.

I unsettled her.

I noticed her too well.

She was relieved to find me one night,

Crying about spitting out swarms of flies in my nightmares. 

She says that nightmares are scattered fragments showing how we each lived and died.

They play out like the scenery outside a train window, quick, scattered, blurred.

Only when we are deep in slumber, eyelids painted with darkness

Do the scenes still long enough to be remembered.

In that stillness, she danced, she hummed,

She whispered to herself about the flies that flew from my mouth in black clouds,

How they took with them the unruly karma I accrued as a spider,

My wayward spirit,

Leaving behind, a special, purifying smoke,

That swirled upwards to fill my empty head and settle my soul. 

But I have still not rested.

She does not know of the violent creatures that strangle my thoughts.

Needle-thin appendages intricately knot my hair into an alluring trap

So that he may capture daybreak and swallow pitiful hope.

These dreams, more terrible and cruel than any unseen thing

Plague me so.

To deserve such relentless suffering,

I must have been an ugly spider indeed.

If ever I was a weaver in my past life, let me spin now

The webs that shall cradle my weary spirit the day I come home to rest,

And may a hundred thousand flies baptize me

As I escape from he who torments my unwaking days.