Gingerbread Graveyard
Deep in the woods where the branches hunch low and the path tastes bitter on a frightened tongue, there squats a cottage frosted thick with lies, every candy tile and sugared brick a trap laid for the young,
I smell the rot behind the syrup, feel the sour under all that shining glaze, see gumdrop teeth along the windowsill grinning wide while licorice veins crack through the walls in crooked maze,
Crumbs on the soil look harmless, little pearls of promise scattered soft and light, but every step that follows them sinks deeper in the breath of ovens breathing in the night,
Names are carved in cookie headstones half-buried under icing, little letters melting back to dirt, and every time my boot comes down I hear a muffled echo of a child still tasting hurt.
Hunger led them, hunger leads me, empty hands reaching for a crust that isn’t theirs to keep,
Sugar on the air, ash in the ground, every bite a vow that something else will never wake from sleep.
Welcome to the Gingerbread Graveyard where the sweetness hides a famine that will never really end, where the fence is built from little bones and every jaw of candy cracks another spine that tried to bend,
Here the windows glow like promises while the chimney coughs up prayers that failed to crawl back out, and the witch hums low in the kitchen with a smile that fits her skull the way a noose fits doubt.
She stands in the doorway smelling like burnt sugar and grave dirt, eyes bright as boiled glass, tongue dipped in honeyed poison as she pats the oven door and tells me hunger’s going to pass,
Her hands look gentle until you see the flour worked into the cracks where little fingernails once clawed, see the way her fingertips tap measuring “just enough” of every soul she saw as flawed.
Around us jars hold marbled shapes that might once have been a wish, hard candy hearts that never got the chance to beat, and on the rafters hang the silhouettes of stories she preferred to overheat.
In the corners stand the pale remains of children who believed the smell instead of all the warning in their skin, drifting shapes with hollow eyes who try to mouth “go back” while the cupboards beg me in,
One boy whispers of a banquet that turned to iron when the latch came down, tells me how the sugar roof collapsed and buried both their laughter and their town.
This is what you get when love forgets its promise and leaves a child alone with empty bowls and quiet floors,
Every abandoned hunger grows an invitation, every unmet touch becomes a knock on wicked doors.
I walk away with smoke in my hair and ashes on my tongue and all their stories sticking to my teeth,
Every step I take from that sick house grinds another candy skull to powder in the leaves beneath,
I will not die inside her kitchen, I will not let her write my name in icing on a slab of stale regret,
Let the Gingerbread Graveyard keep its pretty lies and stolen children—I am not another craving she gets to net.