She was born at the top of the stairs
that rise in the night
to nowhere,
near the winged elm
under a pregnant moon,
full and aching,
like a spider’s belly
who knows it’s time.
When the music stopped
they all breathed out
after a long time of lungs full,
and the electricity in her mother’s heart
dropped into her thighs,
so warm her knees gave out,
hollow pomegranates falling
from her rose-print dress,
an initiation
among the voices of the dead
wrapped tightly around each neck,
the heaviness of release
measured by the grip of tired hands
that hold on
long after the body is emptied.
A child, grown,
feels the weight in her marrow,
keeping watch
over the ancient pain,
her birthright to freedom
from the lineage of war,
here, in the earnest reconciliation,
the mending of the thread.

Venus in Pisces girl
is romanced by the Devil
while the Fool watches,
and the Empress grabs him
by his ear, wise and fumbling,
whispering, “It’s worth living
a season of loneliness
while the blossoms open
and drop
in their own time,”
until a touch in the dark
tells the plants bottled up
in the bottom drawers
that they can grow,
and new skin
is birthed by desire
in the kingdom of
of decaying leaves.

She calls the wind
to carry her away,
but it stays still,
burrowed in roots
entangled by the past-
this is the surrender
to the tiny-boned thing
that lives between waking life
and the one underground,
flesh embroidered
with yellows and violets
like the hope of springtime,
floating soft like secrets
who crush stories from other worlds
into barley
worn bare by the last light
of winter’s day.
Chests rise and fall
as every hole widens-
breath quickens,
quiet sorrows swallowed
sweet and deep.
The unearthing begins.
She makes a circle
of stones that sing,
and the dirt under her nails
carries shriveled cells
from the fight,
hiding from every pair of eyes
except the diamond ones,
and eager mouths
feathered with questions
build flood walls around
every sacred heart.
To understand is to erase the story,
to admit you still feel the walls vibrate
and know they will crumble
but laugh anyway
at the way danger tastes better,
at the way hunger happens
when the stars wake up.
And every slumbering stone
that falls is kissed
by the next passerby
prepared to give meaning
to the unknowable.

The first day after,
and every moment since,
she has thrown open all the windows,
taken the doors off their hinges,
stripped bare and waited,
feet wet with sirens’ voices
dripping down her legs
and seashells falling
from ethereal cords, cut,
Andromeda unchained
from the edges of white rocks,
disintegrating
into the silence
that comes after a storm
has washed it all away.
They were wrong about her,
there was never a rescue,
except for her own choice-
the only choice-
to dive face first
into a clean slate morning,
where the first thing she sees,
and the only thing left,
floating beside her on an empty ocean-
is a salted reflection
of wild roses etched like dreams
on her mother’s sheer cotton dress,
vague and vanishing
below a glassy surface.
She lets herself
become engulfed
by nothing,
and in the emptiness
is the fullness of longing
for some unreachable truth,
facets carved in the dark,
veins illuminated
behind eyelids
that never shut
in the shapes of letters
calling all the hidden angels in.