An eleven-year-old girl
crying about how a tree
grows around a fence, a whale
who sings at fifty-two
hertz: a reliquary
of adaptation, but also
absence.
Bells can only ring
because they are otherwise empty. I am
one hundred unsent letters, the black dog
haunting St. Roch’s, the Mariana Trench
of women.
Life persists in darkness,
in heaviness, in silence—like agony
and like truth—yet reproach remains
forever shaped like two hands
wrapped around my throat.
We all architect the labyrinths
which occupy us yet—the perfect wound,
an ever-hollowing of each reiteration:
some days a plea for forgiveness, others
a demand for blood.
Tell me: what god
asks for this offering?
What altar holds it
without burning?
— C. Lowe