Revisionist Poetry – “Afterheat” – Dragon Head, v.2

I wander through the woods; unfamiliar trunks
tilt their whispered councils overhead—
leaves gossip of buried light, of what the dark keeps.
Beneath my feet a tangle: upturned, rotting roots,
someone’s ribcage turned to earth.

Deeper, my thoughts unmoor. One peeled root
bends like a dragon’s rib, its spine still mapped
in the soil’s slow ridges. I don’t name the beast—
I trace a fossil of flight with my eyes.

Once—there was a heat here, a sky-scarred wing;
now only the trees remember how air bent.
Passing, I catch a rasp, wind over old bone,
and feel that stubborn warmth, a last small kingdom
clinging to these roots as if to keep the map alive.