Eden
I
I crawl in from your madness
a little easier each time, hands raw
from the floor, mouth already parted,
dragging myself through the door
you leave cracked open, air swollen
with your breath, with the promise
of ruin thick in the walls, the honey
of it already dripping onto my skin.
II
I crawl in from your towering cathedrals
where I first learned to worship the rasp
of a zipper lowering slowly, to pray to
the god of please, knees blistering against
stone, palms split, the altar a body I bent
toward until shame filled my throat, gagged
wet, and still I swallowed, let devotion
coat my tongue with ash and silence.
III
A lifetime of searching collapses into your
shadow, and what I find is only your name
ghosted against the roof of my mouth, absent
years collapsing into the hush of my own muted
scream, waiting to be stripped again, to be pulled
open until even the breath sounds like begging.
IV
I drown in the silence left in your
wake, no rescue, no pardon, my body
a tide dragging itself back toward a shore
that cuts it open every time, salt rushing
into the wound, every wave another mouth
that opens wide to swallow me whole.
V
With this easy death hymn singing in my
ribs, Eden is unmade around us; apples
bursting open, wet and red, seeds lost,
scattered in the grass where shame
floods my chest, runs down my stomach
in slick threads, a skin of sweat and oil,
body blushing from throat to thigh where
I kneel inside it, damp, every hollow inch
trembling, I press my face to the ground,
call your hands wings even as they close
around my neck, your mouth opens above me,
a dark cave flooding with silence, a hollow
that swallows everything I have left of myself,
leaves me crawling through the ash you leave.
Believers
they gather again beneath the humming lights, beneath the humming light; something watches ceramic cups steaming like small censers, steam curls like ghosts in its clenched hands breathing monsooned coffee and scripture, breathing iron, the scent of rain before storms, each mouth opens in a performance of devotion, each mouth opens to swallow silence, fear, it is the same story that a child tells in the dark, the same story that the dark tells to a child, it has never existed, can never exist, but the body believes what the skin remembers but belief is older than breath and memory, and fear is older than the tongue that names it grown children, they pray with shaking hands, they cling to the darkness like it will hold them, as if words could bind their fragile bodies before the daylight splits them open again they fear the monsters they never see, they fear the monsters they’ve become, but everywhere that silence gathers, everywhere there is a throat waiting to open, lies in soft breath and calls itself faith, and they call every open wound a prayer.
Niobe, in the Stone of Her Grief
Flesh is stretched and splitting, drawn across stone until it no longer resembles flesh at all; every shape unfinished, every angle collapsing into itself. Once she ached for justice, for morning, for gods who would soften. Now fear coils and calcifies and grows inside her marrow. Eyes burn dry, then bleed, then crust into stone and tears of salt and ash and blood. No rain, but puddles spread from her feet so far that her children drown in their reflections, their shadows crushed into silence behind her. She opens her mouth and her tongue is stone, her throat is stone, her cry is stone. No voice. She is made of fractures, the weight of silence heavier than grief as she is fashioned into a shrine. She weeps and weeps and weeps and nothing repeats itself inside of her cries.
Blood will not forget—dry lips spilling water no one drinks, her body a hollow left cold.
After/Thought Literary 