Identifying Features

Is it suffering who joins you
at the table? Or is it merely cold
and gloom, an animal discomfort?

Does it tell you a story?
Does it whisper in your ear?
Does it try to sell you glamor

or pain? It has this trick
of sliding away when you look at it,
as if it were some kind of fluid

filling the container of the world,
hiding in all the low places.
Is it subject to gravity

or does it merely pretend to fall
at 32 feet per second squared?
It is definitely dark— clothes,

and hair. Or red? Perhaps
those are splashes of blood.
Or highlights? Anyway, the point is,

it will charm you into opening
the door, then strap you with zip ties
to the banister and put a knife

to your throat. Later,
when you try to describe it
to the police artist, you will recall

only its beautiful hands
and the way it sang to you
in the dark.

Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence, a book of epistolary poems. She has work in Verse Daily, The Sun, Nimrod, The Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, The Wayfarer, Whale Road, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among others. Anthology publications include Weaving the Terrain: 100 Word Southwestern Poems, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and Women. Period. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she is a studio jeweler.

[image: Dementor's Kiss by bombattack]