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Lorelei
by Dawn Schout

Give me red
roses, beautiful with thorns,
fingers bleeding.

Say you’ve never known
true beauty till now.
Pay for my wants to fill

the void
I can’t fill in you.
Try to get a foothold. 

I am the stone queen,
heart jagged
and cold as cliffs.

Love is not something I know,
as foreign
as the bottom of the Rhine.

Fingers can’t pull out thorns
I never
meant to embed.

Climb the Alps, spattered with castles,
and plunge into the river
because you can’t have me.

I leap from the throne they put me on.
Can’t close my eyes any more
and squeeze out tears.

They planted me
in the Rhine Valley,
now a statue

facing a castle
where a man lives alone,
my exposed back to the Alps.

Thought I was stone before.
I still hear
your cries, fill this river with tears.

Dawn Schout’s poetry has appeared in more than 50 publications, including Dagda Publishing, Foliate Oak, Poetry Quarterly, Red River Review, and Tipton Poetry Journal. She was nominated for Best of the Net in 2013. Her debut poetry collection, Wanderlust, is scheduled to be published in January 2015 by WordTech Editions.