they’re devouring her patient, psychiatrist, fisher, weaver thimble, knot, pendant, wood cutter they’re devouring her she lets them that’s the bargain struck sulfur and a bright red color ringing her doorbell with velvet glove through the peephole she’s wearing a wig over her sanity it lifts with heavy winds exposing innards, her dirty blend of naught and nothing in individual teabags let’s the draft in right in under her pinched thighs and push-up lies they come with ladles and suitcases dumped all over the waxed floor boxes with pealing sellotape and glue smelling of travel and ruin she’s stopped bathing, it doesn’t wash off a damn thing and the chemical smell that’s nesting in her nostrils plays poker over her diorama of scars they come with empty hands and ransacked wombs blunt knives and desiccated cats in newsprint hours become demons, night is a drunk god after they’ve left, they’re still there dreaming in her head, plucking terrors like weeds dancing in the garden amidst stag beetles and deathhead moths batting their irredescent eyelashes at stone statues turning everything to sickly compost she tastes marching years like a color is it vermillion, is it silver? taupe? bubblegum pink? she used to think words held shape when she found out that falsehood she removed her teeth and shoes ran the length of a beach where the water stole prehistoric sand and lived on stones till heavy enough she could lie beneath seaweed and hear the rush of waves overhead as she sank, grateful, so grateful away from the sound of need all grasping and aching and hungering for what she could not give not ever again her killing holiday wore a skirt as soft as kindling and in her fingers the shells of a thousand mistakes whistled softly 10,000 leagues below.
Photo by Klara Kulikova on Unsplash
Born in Europe, Candice Louisa Daquin is of Sephardi French/ Egyptian descent. Daquin was the Publishing Director at the U.S. Embassy (London) before becoming a Psychotherapist. Daquin is Senior Editor at Indie Blu(e) Publishing, a feminist micro-press and Editorial Partner with Raw Earth Ink. She’s also Writer-in-Residence for Borderless Journal, Editor of Poetry & Art for The Pine Cone Review and Poetry Editor for Parcham Literary Magazine. Daquin’s own poetic work takes its form from the confessional women poets of the 20th century as well as queer authors writing from the 1950’s onward. Her career(s) teaching critical thinking and practicing as a psychotherapist have heavily influenced her writing. As a queer woman of mixed ethnicity and passionate feminist beliefs concerning equality, Daquin’s poetry is her body of evidence.
Indie Blu(e) Publishing 
The Killing Holiday is a novel that if I did not know the writer and I was not working for the publisher, I would have read and LOVED because it’s just THAT good. Kindra Austin is a genius and I truly think this from the bottom of my heart.
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