I took her name because it was mine to begin with. There is no air left in the Garden. There is no air left at all. I was anointed Our Lady Of and I’m undone. The weight of these things was more than I could give you, even when I bled for this, and I have, and still do, but the dark here is sick with all the things I was when I spoke like this, when my mouth moved and there were words that swallowed death, and I did, my body thin as four am, my tongue slit along the pause between this silence and the next one. ASH and BONE. I took her name because I didn’t make it, because she’s the echo, I’m a ghost. I knew the sliver of her that was my heart, even when I was too young to understand that I was a widow before there was anything of me at all. The distance infects everything now. Seven sorrows that uncoil in the chamber, all familiar, close as killing, close as I’ve come to having anything to touch, to measure myself, to fall into grace in every way that counts as beautiful but leaves me gone. There is no air left in the Garden; we’re dust and nothing else. The crucifixion meaningless before the throne. I know the words by heart. Each fall is the first one and my knees hit the asphalt just so. I give up. The song repeats and muscle dissolves, the tendon and the memory, the flower of what bruised me, the steel that slips as soft as I could have been, the once before and always this that unravels in the moment and so I sing and pretend, lungs saturated with contempt. I reflect, unwitnessed. Passion played and still undressed. Real enough to leave for dead but I’m waiting just as I asked, a pause for breath when there’s no air, a blessing in the shape of violence. I can taste the edges of it but the song repeats and it’s endless, the shiver of her name and my skin, a wreckage that’s holy, the void that’s incorruptible as I begin to burn, all flesh and incandescence. I give up. It starts again. There are no words for this. The hours tear and there’s no balance, nothing between my veins and a sudden exit, only silence and the end of this, all the things I tried to hold but lost, because of the weight of angels.
We lean into the hollow, our hearts like fists, our eyes are closed. There are fragments in the darkness with us, songs so lifelike that they’ve learned the fear, and when we’re told we swallow each and every one, pressed against the edges of the world, mouths open. The words take what they can from us, their noise is thick and unforgiving and constant. The city screams and we worship, our asphalt bodies cut apart by its mother tongue. Every act degrades the next one until we hit zero and then we ask and there’s no answer, there’s no one left, there’s nothing real in us and it’s finally enough. We ignite along the inverse. We breathe the absence. We choose to be gods.
My body is an exit. Every day I’m less and less, skin thinned to translucence, ash in the wake of a massacre that left me living or something like it, my bones an offering to a sun I haven’t seen since. I count in the darkness, tonguing the absence. I shatter my teeth on the foundations of the world. There are names in me that will never make a sound, and each facet is buried in what’s still wet beneath the flesh, beautiful and as close as killing as silence gets. Every day the paths shift, a cartography that can only strangle and beg forgiveness, the whole of the labyrinth carved into my spine. I watch with what’s left of pupil and iris, fingers stained with an aftermath that hasn’t happened and I’d laugh but we’re too far along for that so I try to remember what it felt like when I was more than a remnant, more than an echo, more than dust and spit and fear but I can’t. There’s nothing here to immolate. There’s no spark along the underneath of all of this, no promise but the inevitable, nothing to do but drown. This is the shimmer, some after-image of a fall that leaves me incorporeal and still breathing, if a little gone. Every day the world becomes more gentle because it passes through me with less resistance, my smile softer because it’s almost done. I bleed without substance because everything else is lost. If there was beauty here it’s sudden, another prayer to the voiceless that reminds me of what I was. When heaven comes I miss it, I’ve slipped too far and too quickly until even the grief is faded, exiled from the Garden and I know I should feel something but my body is an exit and meaningless, a rush of words and stillness, something like screaming that sounds nothing like it, soft enough to leave me for dead, leave me a wasteland or just like I’ve always been because there’s nothing but the light or the lack of it, the dying indistinguishable from who I am, a blur of colour or something like her but never enough to keep me whole, never enough to pretend I’m anything but a memory or a shadow or a curve that loses itself in another moment like this one, because every day I’m less and less and.
The crown is weightless and I’m triumphant. I’ve clawed my way to the throne and I’m justified because I’m righteous. Fangs out, he said. I know. Straddling the impure and the less-than that could have been this if they’d only been better, if only they’d been as willing to massacre. An edge because I was able to hit harder. I inflict. I’m unquestioning because I’m perfect. I’m unquestioned because I silence. When I speak each word slips past my insect lips and into all the open mouths that wait beneath the dais; they eat and beg and consume and I smile because I’ve anointed myself empress. My defiance is practiced and reinforces what’s already present. I’ve connections with God and I’ll tell you when. My hands around your throat in benevolence. You make me do this. It hurts me when you question this, the fragility leveraged by my fists. You can’t say stop because I said yes. Everything is my due because I’ve earned your compliance. The wounds are real and because of this I can take what you’ve offered and what you haven’t, I can turn the systemic into a portrait. I can wear the face of all of us because the world reflects the bounds of my experience. There’s no need for me to listen until you submit, and I keep telling you because your reticence means that you haven’t heard enough yet. My declarations are holy and I need you to understand this or else you’re just another one of them, come to stain what I’ve built on the backs of the voiceless. My victory is for all of us and if it isn’t what you wanted I don’t know how to keep giving, isn’t it enough that I’ve made it? I am myself and I am good and these things are inextricable, I play for power and it’s the same skin its always been except now I’ve the keys to the kingdom, I’m one of them. I move to protect my own. I lash out because this space is conditional: the crown is weightless until it isn’t. When the noise comes I subsume it, my apologies proclaimed with a gravity that punishes; I’ve learned to make grace into a threat. Everything edged. Cut out your tongues and lift. If I fall you’ve done this. Any act of decency is a concession that undermines the work, because the very real injustice that was done transcends every act of violence. It purifies. It absolves. I put on humanity to keep it out of the wrong hands. I only speak ex cathedra because anything else is weakness. But at the heart of it all there’s no power except what I’ve sold to buy my place in this, the mouths beneath ready to lavish or to kill. An economy that trades on my own flesh. A thousand thousand silences so I could pretend at being formidable when I’m just another chit. The throne is empty. I’m the exception, last in a long line of sacrifices. I speak for all of us. This time it’s different.
PRAY FOR US SINNERS
NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH
I bleed like mercy. I fall through the horizons of the space between us. I won’t belong, now. I have never slept but dream and wake in equal measure; I unravel at the softest touch that never comes. I break my bones into the shape of prayer but there’s no sound. I speak into the black and there’s no answer that echoes in return. I give another vein to prophecy. I am the only witness to my violence. I am the widow of my own heart. I sing and pretend and immolate all I know. I ascend on a trajectory that will never reach the keter. I mimic the mirror and never see myself. I disconnect. I hide the bruises where you’ll never find them. I see what you recoil from and it’s everything I am. I stop moving and it’s indistinguishable from what left me for dead. I get through this. I learn how to breathe and reject it. I suffocate and smile through it; my autopsy is pornographic. I carve the labyrinth into my skin and drink the ashes from the Cup. I am faithful to the betrayal that hurt the most. I remember and I tear out my throat. I drown because my negation is absolute but I will never go far enough. I am unrecognizable and perfect. I have the blood of angels on my tongue. I move blind because there’s no light left here at all. I’ve got the fear and hold it closer. I flinch at the sound of your voice. I shudder into the divinity that abandoned me before we’d even begun. I transcend and shut down. I fuck like absence. I am balanced and collapsing all at once. I look away from what I’ve done. I won’t be long.
Underneath the world there’s only glass. Underneath the words there’s less. I wake up in a room and yesterday never happened but I’m still sleeping beneath a crucifix, the architecture the same every time I dream of it: I know the alleyways and arteries, I know what ends it. XX. I’m a participant or a witness but never in the right moment, it always happens too fast to hold on to it and so we come to the fall and there’s no space for forgiveness, and I wake up in just another room in the world and.
The heart dissolves.
There’s no grace that I can manage that will make up for that lack, the bruise of absence beneath breath and bone that persists in geometries that collapse salvation into distance. And I’m thinning, a slow thing, a little simulacra at the heart of it all, bred for winter but caught all timeless, sunless eyes and smile even if it means killing and it always does. Hello and nothing else. We ache on the eternal and pretend it’s enough for us, the metal of us, the skin and disconnect that makes this familiar right until the last moment. The body seizes. It’s almost done. An autopsy of intimacy without the burden of being close. We’re finally about to touch and I wake up in another and. There’s nothing that hurts because there’s nothing left of it. It’s simple and it’s helpless, it’s another nail through my edges and that’s beauty, isn’t it. Transfixed before the throne. This was mine, naked but for your insistence, your fingers passing over the wound, eyes closed. A miracle that’s bleeding out. What’s sanctified and what’s spoken and what keeps me silent because there’s no answer that’ll come, over and over until it feels like something living, something moving when I’ve fucked stillness into nothing, I press the lie against my mouth, make it real enough to kill for, real enough to mourn. Beatified and torn down. I perform on automatic, dance and hold my breath, Lazarus before her second death. Your eyes are closed.
“You’re a ghost.” An autopsy and a blessing. I never believed it but I understood it, I bled translucent. I was paper-thin and apocalyptic, a smear of nothing that somehow destroyed everything you thought was yours and yet was helpless. In between your fists I blossomed all glorious, a threat because I existed, the little terror that couldn’t. Now there’s truth to it. Now I stop myself dead in the space between these thoughts. Now my hands are around my throat and I’m perfect. I’m the aftermath I’ve made of myself, my drowning tongue. I demand, now. And I’ve seen how far you’ll allow it, your distress when these inhalations slip out of my mouth. Panic. She answers, she smiles. We’re not finished. I steal myself a little silence and it’s different, a quiet that comes from absence instead of violence. I’ve been speaking about gentleness and I’ve meant every word of it, it’s just now I’ve stopped confusing kindness with trespass and I’m not afraid to lose you and everyone else for it, because the love I have in me is holy and precious and terrifying and I believe in it more fully than anything else I’ve ever known.
I’m a ghost. I hold my breath until I don’t. I speak and speak and try to let that be enough. When days pass between words in the weight and the rush it’s all that I can do to make it to the next one, because gravity will kill us before anything else, my heel bruised as I bring it down. A moment for the hours that kept us close, fingers turned to stone, a little flower for the heartless thing that I’ve become. A moment that feels like faith did, once. I ask her because she’s the only one who knows the truth of it, I ask her because she understands what stopped. I speak and my spit tastes like a thousand things, now, and it makes me feel like it couldn’t have been me all those years ago but it was, and it’s hard. I speak and then silence and we’ve been here before, so I go. I shift and tear until I’ve new skin, new scars that I’ve written, until I’ve memorized the edges of this memory that I think still means me, even though that died years ago, even though. A garden that I’ve given to myself. This was never anything else. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve made all this mine and sometimes I wonder if anyone will ever echo except I know the answer and it’s hard. There’s a mirror and I pretend I’m on the other side of it, that I can see any reflection at all. It’s a frequency that shivers and I lift her hand in benediction, I cross myself in ashes and in blood. The song turns itself over, and she holds her breath until she doesn’t. I only believe in this. There’s nothing else.
BLESSED ART THOU AMONGST WOMEN
We are dead but not silenced. There is no light in the city; it’s endless. We catch and laugh and disappear and it’s meaningless up until the moment when it means everything and then. A little concrete for the incorporeal, a spill of street and secret things, a pause before and then. A forever that’s lost its balance. Careening from the knowing and the lost and forgetting the difference between them. The rain is with us, chasing down edifice and flesh like all the lullabies you think you’d remember if you could just catch your breath. Something heavensent or murderous. We’ve got the fear, or maybe it’s just part of us, all that’s left of some reflection of another night like this, here in the city. There’s nowhere to go so we move, passing stranger and stranger, a stop-motion kind of whisper that could never hope for sound. It’s night or something like it, and we count with fingers in our mouths, trying to suck the last of the rain from our skin. The sky is gone and in its place is something worse. An unforgiving thing that’s all sick with stillbirth, without death. We don’t look up if we can help it and the city drowns out most all of it, only sometimes the edges slip through and then there’s quiet. We make cathedrals out of the bones of what’s come before us. We burn as effigy and sacrifice. Cut the throat of dawn to keep the darkness. The city is holy, and we eat of it, we take each tiny bit of dust upon our tongues and it’s the whole of it. We are the Body, only without one. Sometimes we forget that. The corners of the streets reach out to greet us, they welcome us home. We hunt in the wild places, draped in asphalt, in love with dead streetlights. Sodium-orange stars. The air is too thick and too thin all at once; there’s too much and never enough of it. The stories are unravelling into threads so we slip them in our pockets, try to keep them safe but they’re gone before we’ve had the chance to forget. Losing more and more every minute, so we move, we pick up speed. Terminal velocity in place of distance. The city forgives us, its horizon an illusion that pretends at an exit, a love letter that undoes itself while we dance and keep dancing until the glass bends to kiss the emptiness, the little hole we keep in memory of you. We lift our hands to nothing and call it god. We spill our lives into the gutters, the blood of martyrs, we turn the buildings inside-out and shatter on a frequency that leaves the world undone. There is nowhere left but this.
Gently, gently. My skin is only dust, here. I’m alone. A soft fall that sings as sweet as I’ll remember this moment to have been, all those years ago. The memory isn’t what it was, not those long-dead afternoons at four am, smoke on my lips, veins pure and ravenous, no—it’s different. We breathe in. The light reaches to the edge of us and no further. My shadow thinned to spirit. There’s only space so long as I’m silent, my life contingent on playing delicate, a passage of scent that might linger when I’m gone but not present, no—it’s different. But this isn’t what I meant with this. I had an idea of a moment that I wanted to unfold, petals and all, something quiet that I still can’t quite manage on my own, a swallow of centuries and instants that slips between tongue and iris, all beautiful and desolate and. I’m still trying to understand it. To have grace enough to be overwhelmed by it, this new place where I’m strung between terror and nothing else. A little balance without the loss I’d come to associate with it. A martyr in the shape of her. A living pyre, or near enough, the heartbeat long since given up for kindness. I sing and. Pretend that morning will come and I’ll live, my hours reversed, the thread of joyous panic that means there’s still something left to lose. Gently, here. The words are me and nothing else. I pass for vapour, an accident of the corporal left alone too long. A shiver and a bit of sound. The descent is slow but there’s no way to stop so I immolate and have done, a spark born from the afterburn of stars. Ah, remember. The words are familiar because I’ve said them all before. A room in the world and it’s been years, tiny shifts and particularities of breath that stir up the dust into something resembling myself, something translucent and perilous, a gentleness that’s close enough to kill and never does. I slip in, invited but unwelcome, my body a mirror that destroys all the evidence. I have been without.
The day and the hour. We’ll pass through together, our blood-brain barrier, tongue on teeth I should have sharpened rather than give in to form and void. Exhale along the inverse and pretend I could shine as anything but cold, another bead across my thumb. All interstitial, this, a conversational act of violence that seethes beneath as all things do, to be at all. I’m making myself keep up, heartless on the sudden stop. I draw another and another and start to see that it was inevitable, the consequence of drowning first and waking after, never breathing out. An exit wound in the shape of what violates us. The remnant of the remnant. The Final Trump.
As if skin has permission that words don’t, as if the brush and touch and blood could be more than sound. My hands are closed. Legs crossed. The wages of sin spilling from my mouth. This thing in front of me is everyone I’ve lied to and I lie again because that means survival, I lie and it’s perfect, it’s hesitant and delicate and plays on all the obeisance you’ve decided I owe. I know this game by heart. I know this game by heart. I lie and it sounds so much like you that you feel as if you’ve teased it out, the great white hunter, generous benefactor, dispensing courtesy from power, giving because you’ve only ever had enough. I peel back the board and show you everything, tell you exactly how I’ve won, the moves you conceded before you knew we’d begun, every inch of it, laugh myself sick because even then you think you’ve claimed it, your privileged access, my little emperor of nothing at all. I play for blood. Life and death, love, it’s five steps to the door but two to the left if I go for the throat. As hard as I can I count. Seven sorrows. I give birth to the annihilation of nations. I smile when I ask for your help. My spine is the divide between heaven and earth. I pause, look up, catch myself. I am immolation and ruin. I see you, caught, playing with what God gave you and it isn’t enough. Shall I be merciful.
I know this game by heart.
This is the silence that awaits us. The cloister I’ve made out of heart and words and bone. The aftermath of learning all the undertow of what wasn’t said but still meant life and death, those little things like context. Threw myself in because the only way out was down. The fall. This is the silence that’s all I’ve got. It’s the distance that’s closer than whatever the words might have been, a grasp at syllable that never matters because it’s always been the same. Empty because you insist there’s nothing to say. Only echo. I believed you. Unravelled my words until they were thin enough to pass for nothing, pass for breathing, pass for the mirror I thought would answer when nothing else could. The one I promised myself would hear me, if only. A litany or cacophony. Anything but silence. Yet this is where I have to press my hands around the whole of it and finally accept the nothing that’s left in my wake. Learn the shape and the weight of it and swallow it whole. Reclaim my birthright, that tiny intake of space before I kill what’s left of the heart. Can you hear this? If I ask, will you answer? Will you understand that the question isn’t coming, that you lost that thread long before we ever got to this? My threats were empty, just like this. A kindness that let you try out all the faces and words and stories you wanted to, with no consequence, just the silence that sounds like acquiescence if you ignore I was ever here at all. This is the silence that’s permanent, or so I’m told. A fatal diagnosis for wanting to hear you, hear anything at all for all the years of this, where I’ve spilled and scarred and cried for just the flicker of something in return. I asked and you wouldn’t answer. That’s been the whole of this, you understand this, yes? That’s all that’s ever been behind this. And I don’t know if it’s my shallowness or the loneliness that hurts more. Or the fury that insists I shouldn’t need to hear a word of it. Even still. Moments where I could play pretend that they were mine, where I’d fit, where I’d speak and there’d be space to hold the whole of it, not just the words but their answers, too, because it’s the most beautiful thing I could hope for. And there’s just silence that awaits this.