the world opens up as a new monster looms on the horizon, belching fire, slaughtering victims without thought to gender, creed, or age: the smallest of the small, resistant to her older brother’s charms, no longer spared infectious breath.
not content to massacre millions by breath alone, she melts crematoriums whose iron frames soften, run from the heat of so many bodies burned in so few hours, days, weeks of death; chimneys crack from overuse, appalling mockery that mimics hospital beds buckling from the influx of live bodies they strain to save and might despite their failures. Parks no longer host festivals but burning pyres that brighten twilight like bonfires left behind by the wyrms’ warm feasting
or colossal candles lit in earth’s cathedral for each of those extinguished lives, bright enough to catch the eyes of the gods in their heavens or the demons down below.
the beast that plagued last year seems tame beside his younger sibling, the serpent virulent exhaling flame who does not deign to spare the lives of children.
Will she leap across the waters, span the ocean, leave that far off land to spread her curse upon our slowly awakened shores?
Does she await our recovery only to make her scourge more felt?
# Thanks for stopping by my blog. If you’d like to read about the crafting of “Plague of Dragons,” check out my Patreon next week for a free technical breakdown of the poem.
Cat Russell 