There descends a mist, an impending thickness hanging in the air, the putrefaction of white picket fences, discolored paint flaking to reveal rotting fibers; Southern Belles, plump and ripe for the harvest, pupils like pins under the haze of summer skies. 

Fruits of love, long-tenderly nurtured, bright-eyed while unknowingly herded toward the slaughter, sold to rough hands and grinning teeth. 

Roots abruptly severed, sweet, sticky tears coating the fingertips of the proprietor who strips all her petals and leaves when she begins to weep. 

A beauty mutilated by familiar hands, now a darkened, leering ghost, whose purulence infects the once fertile soil, tainting the spiders and beetles and worms. 

The bloody, cracked fingernails, split from clawing at their throats as the sands of time continue to fill gasping lungs, counting down to the inevitable transgressions against the flesh that have long been forewarned. 

The heat of the sun rays, baking the fields of waving gold, the clicks of cicadas punctuating the deeply held traditions, grotesque secrets held in the deep lines of her face, the dusts of her long forgotten but still haunting the hills where she nurtures the seeds that follow, seeds growing from the graves of their kin.

Wind-worn elegies and a prayer unanswered: please God, if you really are there… release us from this suffocating cycle, this cruel, vengeful blaze– unable to untie the knots biting into ankles and wrists, at war with the charring of tender pulp and the crystallization of blood diamonds, mined for their perceived value, body husked and discarded, to not even die with dignity… 

to not even die with the dignity of being the keeper of the keys to the shackles that rattle and clack against her naked bones.