“HOW ANGELS SLEEP: Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the Living. They know so little about what it’s like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude. Also, they don’t dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.”
“I never want another thing
that feels like home again” I told her.
“But my hands keep building them.”
The alabaster architecture of
this calcium cathedral boasts
an outward-curling structure,
like a plant seeking light
and warmth, vining out from
the many crooked corridors and
wet courtyards of self.
Bone meal is what we’re left with
when fire is finished with us.
It is phosphorous and sun dust,
to be scattered at the feet
of trees who are too young
to know drought.
All the love I give
takes its long way back home
to me. They say
nutrient-rich foods grow
the slowest. And so I’m mindful
about what I use to satisfy
my hunger and thirst. I return
home to my burrow night
after night, and do my best
to maintain
other stores.
Even so, other cravings
naturally arise. It is thus
that I recently learned
that owls do not
chew.
They take the world in whole.
A vole, a finch, a soft-boned dream—
swallowed intact. They have no teeth
you see, only a hooked insistence and
a throat made to
widen.
Within them the acids of muscle
and mercy engulf their finding, dissolving
soft parts—muscle, organ, warmth—to be
rendered into fuel. What can nourish,
nourishes. What cannot—fur, teeth,
and bone—gathers.
And from its mouth is casts a pellet—a
tight, matted reliquary of what refused
to become blood.
Evidence of hunger.
Proof of survival.
I gather found bones.
It’s these indigestible pieces
which gather and ache within
me, also—the external softness, the canines,
the ribcage—which I cannot absorb.
And so I seek to press them together,
and cast them from my mouth.
Come next solstice I’ll be standing
beneath my tree, holding some evidence
of what I once tasted, saying:
“This too fed me.
This too kept me alive.”
- Cierra Lowe, 2026