wormwood.

she vowed to stop imputing the sparks in others' synapses.
she said the green fairy was as mythical as greener grasses.
she said she was tired of looking for it, the next, new magic.
she said she was tired of failing to find it, in skulls or in bottles.

"people are like this," she told me, and swirled wormwood and ipecac
into her coffee with her index, and the opaque liquid swallowed her finger whole.
"you can't touch their secrets, or see their potential."
she said only the most covert of internal processes could reveal them.

it was later that all that potential expelled itself from her,
and splashed sparkling, transparent, and noxious, onto the ground.
i asked her what secrets she had uncovered, but she only said
he wasn’t worth it, all this internal bleeding.

despite her melodrama, it wasn't artificial, that visceral release,
although her body's promises were.

she says the earth swallowed up her confessions
that they're dead within the soil, arrested, stagnating,
she says she'll never realize what she imagined.

but if she knew how matter transforms itself
she'd know she changed the atmosphere forever.