Coscoroba’s Gift – Louise Mather

In the jelly of my throat
lodged a thorn –

from larvae, roots, emeralds,
millennia carves a temple.

I ask the swan for an echo,
jasmine, a rung of coal –

a troika, the way
my grandmother weaved

ligatures of old straw –
a gift folded into a slipper,

or the slipper is a ritual
tempered by the dawn.

This thorn will tear
through ice, soot, augury –

my body is not stone
like the blood of Medusa,

its invisibility,
this occult

I will perish –

please, stake it to a box
for Pandora,

or some other
exiled soul –

to pierce the ocean.

Louise Mather is a writer from Northern England and founding editor of Acropolis Journal. A finalist in the Streetcake Poetry Prize and Nominated Best of the Net 2021, her work is published in various print and online literary journals. Her debut pamphlet ‘The Dredging of Rituals’ is out with Alien Buddha Press, 2021. She writes about ancestry, rituals, endometriosis, fatigue and mental health. Twitter @lm2020uk