a body is an archive: unveiled
when i stumbled open--
claw-click, serrate-jaw,
wet antennae mapping paths i had never known.
skin, then flesh, then
(oh—how the soft explodes)
a threshold becomes a feast,
& i was alive for it.

they sang in that minor key,
the one tuned for
half-breaths.
sinews hummed electric as
the burrow began--
an architecture of frenzied mouths
churning absence into corridors,
each passage alive with the memory
of something never buried.

and is this not the nature of hunger?
to make the once-firm
a slurry of purpose?
they never meant to unravel
all i held,
but the burrow was me now.
(to be remade is to perish inside out.)

what the insects did not take
were pieces too sharp to swallow:
a wrist pressed to pulse--
the wrist itself forgotten;
an eye, emptied of meaning,
but still watching--
watching even as the body became
a hymn sung low
in thorax vibrations.

and there was no end.
no death.
no quiet.
only their small & perfect hands
reaching
(yes, always reaching)
for the marrow,
for the root of whatever i had been.

what remained was not myself.
but the insects
were full.

It begins on the heights,
where the air cuts thin and sharp,
a blade against the lungs.
The fleeing shape streaks through brittle stone,
claws scraping grit,
its breath a shallow rasp
dragged from the unyielding cold.
Behind, something larger descends—
a gaunt silhouette, ribs taut like scaffoldings,
its strides pulled tight by the raw command of hunger.

No fury found in it, no malice—
only the hollow, grinding need to chase.
Each bound closes the distance,
each breath carves away the body that draws it.
Muscle tautens, bones grind,
but it cannot falter.
It will not.

The hunted stumbles.
A single stone shifts beneath its frantic weight,
a ripple of imbalance
that nearly topples the fragile line between survival and failure.
But forward it surges—
not with strength,
but the refusal to surrender.
Behind, the shadow presses closer,
its breath a low rasp,
its limbs too precise for mistakes,
its gaze fixed on the fragile promise of life ahead.

In another world, on another path,
where bellies were full and shadows were safe,
the hunter might have seen the fleeing shape
as a partner in the play of limbs and leaps,
an echo to its boundless motion.
So too, the prey might have paused
to watch the hunter bound through snow,
no longer a threat but a spectacle,
both content to share the same wide sky.
But this is not that world.
Here, there is only the *****,
the strain,
the brittle thread that pulls them both taut.

Below, the frozen plain stretches wide,
its surface a gleaming wound,
its tension barely concealed.
The hunted reaches it first,
feet skidding across the brittle crust,
fractures snapping out in frantic bursts.
Behind, the larger shadow follows,
its weight heavier,
its steps forcing splinters into the surface,
the distance collapsing with every bound.

The leap comes—violent, inevitable.
Two bodies collide,
a tangle of limbs and intent.
Then the ground answers,
not with a roar,
but a sharp, final crack.
The surface gives way.
They fall together,
pulled into the black water below,
where the cold rises to meet them.

It—like the hunter—is not cruel.
Cruelty would demand intent,
and it has none.
In any world, in any place,
it takes.
It hungers for nothing, needs nothing,
but claims all that enters its grasp.
Breath. Motion. Warmth.
All are sifted into stillness.
It threads itself between muscle and marrow,
pressing out life with an indifference
too vast to name.

Above, the plain smooths over,
its scars vanishing into pale perfection.
The ***** watches in silence.
The wind moves on,
carrying no memory of struggle,
no whisper of what was lost.
Only the stillness remains,
a quiet that lingers heavy and final,

where nothing flees,
and nothing follows.

and sometimes we just get caught up in the wake."


I am draped in flowers,
soft as sleeping youth,
so tired of pretending,
that my bones are light
and I am not already undone
by the weight of the sun,
the burden of the trees,
and the sky—
so blue
I feel it ache.

The clock hums in its cage—
a bird who hasn’t sung
since I remembered
that I am still here,
still spinning,
still waiting for the knife
to fall,
not in terror,
but in the foolish hope
that it will
cut me
in the right place—
in the place where I am supposed to bloom.

See, there is joy in the dust,
(but it tastes like rust)
and even as I pull at the flowers—
petal by petal, sweet,
delicate,
so delicate—
I wonder,
will I ever learn to swallow
beauty without choking
on the things it means to me?

The river doesn't wait.
It stretches its arms,
pulls me in,
lapping at my ankles
as if to remind me
that nothing is ever still—
no joy, no suffering,
no sweet desire
that hasn’t already
turned on its heel.

And yet,
with every break,
with every fracture—
there is this laugh,
so deep in my chest,
as though I could sing
just once
for the sorrow that defines
me—
(or maybe it is the joy
that has been hiding
in my bones all along).

The moon is full,
and yet I feel empty.
Still, I pull in breath
like it is something I can hold.
Perhaps this is my mistake.
Perhaps
it is all just falling apart
as it should,
and I am the fool
to believe otherwise.

But the stars,
oh,
they will keep dancing,
won’t they?
The night will never ask me
for permission
to be beautiful
just as it is.

So I hold my hands out
to catch the light
that I don’t deserve—
and I am okay with it.
I am okay.
Just for this moment—
just for now,
I will be the one
who does not break
when the river does.

But this,
this,
is only for a second.
The truth is in my skin,
and it hums
with the ache of something
I can't quite parse.

Oh, but the stars.

The vent below exhales,
its breath a low, metallic whisper
curling upward, tangled in the night's damp hair.
Above us, the city blooms in soft amber haze,
its heartbeat a symphony of horns and laughter,
a language I no longer understand.

Her name unfurls in the dark,
not hers,
but borrowed now by another—
a stranger’s voice wrapping itself around it,
bright and unknowing.
Still, it finds me,
piercing through ribs and cardiac muscle,
the way light slips through a cracked shutter.

I hold my drink like a lifeline,
the glass cool and steady against my hand,
but my heart betrays me,
wild as a startled animal.
I tilt my face toward the skyline,
feigning interest in the sprawl of lights—
but all I see is her,
the echo of her name rippling outward,
filling the space where I thought I’d buried her.

I wait,
aching for the brush of a hand on my arm,
a grip, a sudden hug, and a voice,
quiet and certain:

“You don't have to bury her in metaphor,
You don’t have to dress her as sky,
or wind,
or the aching hymn of the sea.

Tell me how her laugh struck,
low and sudden.
Tell me how her hands knew the architecture
of your shoulders,
how they built you back
every time you threatened to fall apart.

Tell me how her eyes,
brilliant and cutting,
saw through every mask,
every defense you’d perfected,
and stayed anyway.

Tell me if she would have stayed longer,
if you’d asked her to.
And tell me how you’ve managed to carry
the ghost of her absence,
its weightless gravity pulling at your ribs,
its silence louder than anything
you’ve ever dared to speak.”

But no one asks.
The moment dissolves
into the hum of strangers—
their laughter as distant as stars,
their faces blurred by the dark.

The vent exhales again,
its breath curling like smoke,
and I let her name settle—
not as a wound,
but as an ember,
small and fierce,
glowing against the hollow of my chest.

I stand there,
facing the city,
and though the night breeze feels cool against my face,
I burn.

In the hollow where gears no longer grind,
a machine dreams, rusting in its stillness—
each cog a cathedral of forgotten motion,
each bolt a hymn to the violence of purpose.

It once devoured silence,
crushing it beneath the weight of its song,
an engine that mapped the tremors of time
in spirals of smoke and steel.

Now it whispers to the dust,
its voice a brittle thing,
like wind caught between
the ribs of a shipwreck.

Once, it drank light,
spinning photons into meaning,
spitting stars from its teeth—
but entropy comes as a thief,
gentle in its theft,
unthreading the tapestry of will.

This is the prayer of the obsolete:
not for salvation, but for witness,
for the sparrows that roost in its hollows,
their claws etching eulogies
into the flaking paint.

If you press your ear to its frozen heart,
you will hear the echoes of a once-throbbing world:
the gasp of pistons,
the sigh of levers,
the pulse of a century spilling forward,
greedy for what lay beyond the horizon.

But what it built, it cannot name—
only the faint impression remains,
like the shadow left by a hand
long lifted from a wall.

To live is to be made
and unmade.
To endure is to surrender
to the quiet art of decay.

In its silence, the machine waits,
not for revival,
but for the soft forgiveness
of rust.

And when it falls,
scattered into earth,
the ground will hum
with the memory of its weight.

the river breaks open (like ribs)
unmaking the earth in quiet tongues,
it flows unendingly:
she
does
not.

each stone hums her absence (or mine?)
while its waters slip soft knives
between the spaces where a heart
once folded neatly into hers.

the lake is still, an unfinished
sentence—its surface holds nothing
but sky, which has always been
indifferent. I do not reach
into its shallow silence;
I know it would not forgive me.

(oh
the sea).
each wave rises only to fall,
its breath (a sob, a scream, a sigh)
pulling the shoreline apart grain
by aching grain—
and i stand
where foam clings to my feet,
wanting
to
follow.

i write of the water because
it moves and I cannot.
because the tide swallows her name
and spits it back (broken,
empty,
wrong).

grief is not a thing
it is everything
it is the way my chest
folds in on itself like a ruined map.
it is the sharp edges of nothing
scraping against everything
until only this ache remains.

and when the river hums, when the lake stills,
when the sea pulls me open
just to leave me raw,
i know—
absence is the heaviest thing
i will ever hold.