Dark Dolls by Kristin Garth

You survive — if not exactly intact,

though your hair grows long enough to hide exposed vertebrae, perforated back 

where flesh atrophied while you lie inside 

a grave.   Abandoned beneath the lilies a season before, by witchcraft, you are saved,

bathed in chamomile and calendula,

from the garden of a botanist depraved,

herbs refined in dirt like the castoff your 

diabolist decided to save. Wraith 

she disguised in crimson-stitched pinafores 

to simulate a small saint, those of faith 

instinctively adore — though perhaps misled

by one who conjures dark dolls from the undead.