To Marcy,

Marcy MsStake, living on the edge of the world, where it is mostly night-time, and dark moon long enough to clamber out of the window to go dance by the gravestones—you said you’d fucked there. I want your wolf-yellow eyes to ravage my rabbit-flesh til my bones shudder and weep milk. You’d let me shake, you’d remind me Lethe is not liquid but scree. You know this because you gathered what you could in a hessian sack and use it for a pillow. Your dreams are dog-daisies and riverwort, fish-hooks and constellations that etch runes in your eggshell cheek. I want to see, trace, learn with the intimacy of fingertips: tundra and blackberry, hawthorn and moss, or that your skin is eggshell on an albumin heart—not quite congealed enough for cake curd not quite salty enough for sea. Marcy, teach my tongue Gaelic, and the language of elves, and how to lick out the lairs abandoned by stoats—Marcy, Tibrogargan is watching, tries to read what I scratch into paperbark, mutters what he’ll do if i’m taken by some feral shade. It is midnight now, and still twilight. If I can slip through the sclerophyll without being seen, if I can outrun the thunder, if I can summon a kelpie and cross the warm sea—meet me at the graveyard at half-past three?