Featured Poem II • March 2018
Porphyria’s Other Lover
Cassandra Rose Clarke
In the spring, wildflowers grew so tall they covered the gravestones, and the air was so thick with pollen that I thought I knew what it felt like to be her, the air trapped in my lungs by a braid coiled tight around my throat, as tight as her embrace. The first time I saw her I took her for sunlight, as bright and transparent as desire. A prism among the wildflowers, an optical illusion. But she was as real as death. Her touch left me shivering, a respite in the heat of the afternoon. Her kiss drew time out of me like a breath. I didn’t notice when spring vanished, when the wildflowers burned away, when the world died for summer because I had already died for her in the golden grasses of her grave. She pinned me like a butterfly, displayed me like a sculpture, then left me to shine in the bleached-bone sun the way all ghosts shine.
Cassandra Rose Clarke grew up in south Texas and currently lives in a suburb of Houston, where she writes and works for a local literary arts nonprofit. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin, and in 2010 she attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle. Her work has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her latest novel is Star’s End, out now from Saga Press.
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