I summoned the storm. I confess this now. 
My reason, of the heart. There were thorns 

in my heart. It began with chills, then fever 
in the blood. I was dreaming of radishes

scarlet on my tongue. The light on the earth 
bewildering, ravishing the shade of secrets. 

And I longed for reprieve: rains of the night 
drowning the moors, dark stars of mysterium, 

spring. There was no shelter. I was all that 
was left of me. Sheep scurried from the sumac 

hills & villagers called their children from the 
gardens. In the darkening crimson of evening, 

the unbearable beauty of supper was seen as 
if for the first time and the last in a fig’s florid 

flesh, the furl of fiddleheads fried with flour. 
When the hanged man sang on the hawthorn 

tree, he sang the storm from me: as he said he 
wanted my body — and for himself, said he’d 

have me for his young, blond bride if we met 
long ago, if he was not dead. It was not me he 

desired, but delusion — perhaps prestige,
coming back to life.That was the last of him. 

After, I saw him held before the thorn of the 
tree, his lips sown shut with red, poisonous 

thread. Some nights, I hear him humming 
from the crook, blood brittle on the grasses, 

shuttering. And the birds? There were no birds. 
The storm came and left with none but me.

[Anastasia K. Gates is a writer, editor, and artist from Pennsylvania. Her poetry was awarded the shortlist for the inaugural Oxford Poetry Prize and her work has been published in Only Poems, Tupelo Quarterly, Oxford Poetry, Some Kind of Opening, Counterclock Journal and elsewhere. She earned her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Columbia University in the City of New York.]