Esme Devault Ink

Esme Devault is a poet, attorney, and non-fiction writer living in Barrington Rhode Island with her husband and college age son. Her poetry has appeared in Motherscope, Spadina Literary Review, Streetlight Magazine, Solum Literary Journal, Kissing Dynamite and numerous other publications. She is a former English teacher and academic reference librarian and ran a book and writing group at the women’s maximum-security prison in Rhode Island for 10 years.

ink blot

you run naked through this city sweat of the night glistening down your back as the moon drops
like a bomb. there are stars falling falling falling all around you, but there’s nothing, nothing, you
can do. your fear and pride woven tightly like a second skin a full-length flak jacket, fashioned as
a flapper’s fur coat what was once impenetrable your sheet metal armor became just as weighty
dragging you down, down, down. you cast it off in the corner dumpster, throw high the match a
real nighttime flare, not just a double burnt decoy and watch breathless as it blows that tinder box
sky high. you will not self-immolate you are the flame you are the fury you own this town all its
raspy whispers and whisky soaked streets. the cascading shadows of past, present and future
tangled together like a bear catcher your safety net beneath the tightrope of your own design. you
no longer need air you don’t breathe you self-ventilate you are the night sky. you are the leopard
you are the spider you are the lizard. no one can catch you no one even tries. why try to fail? why
chase the invisible? the mist the scent of time you, passing through, leaves them numb. they feel
your sound vibrate but they hear nothing blinded by the ghost of your presence. you exhale taste
of lightning on your breath. sparks flying from your fingertips feet floating above ground.