Justine's aside

He looks at me the way a chapel looks—

All candle-smoke and aching in the beams;

Like if he blinks, the rafters crack to books

And every book becomes a nest of dreams.

He names me huge. He builds me like a gate.

He makes my laughter into drums of fate.

And God, I want him. Want him like the storm

Wants to unbutton every careful tree.

Want him like frost wants orchard-blooming form,

Like fire wants paper’s brief, bright blasphemy.

I want to bite the world down to the bone

Until his yes is ringing in my own.

But hunger’s easy. Any wolf can take.

Any small god can swagger, blaze, and loom.

The trick—the craft—the arete I make—

Is not to turn my wanting into doom.

To be a door that doesn’t eat the hand,

To be the power that can understand.

So I pause the pageant. Let the titles fall

Like shed-out leaves, like glitter losing grip.

I set my crown down on the hedge-arc wall

And keep my teeth behind my laughing lip.

“Hey dude,” I say—plain language, ground and rail—

“Look at me. Stay. We’re not a fairy tale.”

Because he’ll drift. He’ll worship himself blind,

Go trance-deep, go cathedral, go away—

And I don’t want a saint-card left behind

While he forgets he got to choose the play.

I want him present. Want his body’s vote.

Not just his poems. Not just his shining throat.

I lift my hand and halt it in the air—

A comet with a careful, trembling tail—

And let him see my wanting living there,

And let him see it listening as well.

“Can I?” I ask. “And where? And what degree?”

And watch relief bloom wild across his face at me.

His answer—oh—his answer is a key

That doesn’t break inside my hungry lock.

He tells me truth in small geography:

“My hair. My arm. Here. Not my throat.”

I nod like scribes who mark a binding clause,

As if consent were ancient, sacred laws.

(It is. It’s older than the horns I blow.

Older than glamour. Older than the chase.

It’s what makes ravenous a thing that glows

Instead of something that disgraces.)

So when I touch him, I touch like a vow—

Like I will not become your nightmare now.

I check his breath the way I check a flame.

I watch the flicker. Watch the tilt of fear.

“Still good?” I ask, and mean it, mean his name

As something real that I am honored to hear.

And when he says yes—soft, wrecked, sincere—

My whole hedge-citadel leans in, ear to ear.

Then I let a little feral show—

Just enough teeth to make the moment sing—

And he shivers like the pond-ice under snow,

And I could take him—take him—take the thing—

But I don’t. I choose. I hold the line.

That’s queenship, babe. That’s how I keep it mine.

So later, when I whirl away to town,

Market-day apples bright as petty sin,

He’ll swear I vanished—glamour dropping down—

But I’ll have left my mark beneath his skin:

Not antlers. Not the horn. Not Halloween.

A simple truth, in plain vernacular:

“Your no is law. Your yes is miraculous.”

And then—because I’m me, because I’m Justine—

I holler at the deer across the green:

“Next time you cross my weir, you lanky thieves,

I’ll trim your asses into autumn leaves!”