Emma Wells is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry published with various literary journals and magazines. She enjoys writing flash fiction and short stories also. Emma won Wingless Dreamer’s Bird Poetry Contest of 2022 and her short story entitled "Virginia Creeper" was selected as a winning title by WriteFluence Singles Contest in 2021. Her first novel is entitled Shelley’s Sisterhood which is due to be published in late 2023.
Feral Heart
Stalking for weakness,
you feign temerity -
honing hard, pushing mousy fear
into tightly-wedged corners
of dust-clogged rooms
of shadowy forgetfulness.
I cower, coughing sharply,
burying a soft-skull to floorboards
pretending it is merely a nightmare:
nothing real here.
Nothing tangible -
only tautly spinning nerves.
Raising pathetic hackles,
I try to propel you away
but hotly pulsing fur
lumbers forth
knocking me blind
with fetid breath.
My claws scratch downwards
trying not to catch
my downturned reflection
in once polished surfaces:
now, smudged, marred by time
as matted, unbrushed hair
of a wildling child
dwelling in fairy-tale forests,
forgotten by modern time.
Backing farther away
to gloaming edges,
that prod sharply,
I close my awakened, vixen eyes,
simultaneously opening
my dark, charred heart,
a dying black rose,
flicks embers out:
charcoal, wispy ribbons
dying of exposure
amidst cobwebbed oblivion;
a muted, but feral-laced heat.
Effervescence briefly purges forth -
within a singular band of light
from a barred windowpane,
a sliver of my heart.
Truth rips him apart.
I see choked intestines
writhing macabrely from maimed love
like earthworms searching fast
for earthen, darkling oubliettes:
hiding duped heads
in burgeoning black holes
of endless, empty expanse.
You, a mass of deadened souls -
loosely stitched into a cage of onyx fur -
are nothing - yet the cause.
As you turn to leave,
I intrepidly place
a growing panther-paw,
no longer mouse-like,
readying to battle you
using my hidden, feral heart
as a steeled weapon.
Unbidden, a roar bellows forth,
leonine and fiercely-fired,
locked inside my imprisoned soul;
it sends you scampering,
wholesomely terrified,
from my tooth and claw warren
where only truth rotates,
dripping as a libertine
fueled by Romanticism
from my extending canines,
and unfurling claws:
a gothic Ferris wheel –
a game you cannot play.
My talons tap out your name
like Morse code:
a morose melody
upon hollow, haunting boards
as I breathe heavily
eyeing my panther silhouette
framed by moonlight
glowing as embers inside,
is my feral, beating heart.