The Sin Eater
- The Sin Eater
Little red, bring your basket bedside. What meal have you made?
Something to make you bleed. To make you breed.
Something to make your thrush-throat seethe.
Quicksand the curtains, drape the spine. Cloak those purple, popping limbs.
Take a piece of bread, a sip of ale. Passed over a nightgown, moist and rising.
Carry the woman in your arms, the wolf in your hood. Dislocate all bones. Bury them far from shrinking, inked fingers.
Toast the fortune tellers. The moss.
All that goes down is ghost. [End Page 101]
Colleen Coyne has a hard time answering the question, “where are you from?” She is a freelance writer and editor, and her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Handsome, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Drunken Boat, dislocate, Caesura, Midway Journal, Pebble Lake Review, qarrtsiluni, and elsewhere.
