after Outlander: Dragonfly In Amber

She stumbled upon a corpse with bright, blue fungus
thriving over his thin, white skin. They preserved
his body like flowers in a vase: beautiful yet departed.
She recalled how a soldier said once, “It makes you wonder
where they live between battles.” The thought
brought me to my knees, fingers searching
the soil furtively for seeds that do not exist:
a glimpse at how little we know beyond ourselves.
I can picture how the blossoms would look permuting
from my hands, vivid blooms cascading across
my bony wrists and reaching towards my stilled bosom.
This is how fiction is created, an image plucked
and pressed like petals, captured and reinvented.
I am not her. But she is all of us, facing
the certainty that is death though buoyed by tiny miracles.
It is, after all, how we approach faith. Often too tired to listen,
we find dogma in the blooms that emerge from our bodies.
Perhaps that is why our veins run blue under our skin,
a whisper yet – of what is to come, of what has transpired.



Ashley Sapp  (she/her) resides in Columbia, South Carolina, with her dog, Barkley. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of South Carolina in 2010, and her work has previously appeared in Indie Chick, Variant Lit, Emerge Literary Journal, Common Ground Review, and elsewhere. Ashley has written two poetry collections: Wild Becomes You and Silence Is A Ballad. She can be found on Twitter @ashthesapp and Instagram @ashsappley.