the high priestess sits still on her throneΒ Β her mottled hands beginning to sprout veins Like the roots of an ageless tree her eyes sinking low to the earth, lids heavy with sleep the abstract temple, mismatched in quilted sheets and mangled ceramic fragments encompassing her victims, the children brothers Romulus and Remus who play under a drizzled chorus of shattered glass and winter hesitates as she raises her roots to a flame of Hell fuels the pyre with white snakeroot and , suckling from the Jack-in the pulpit feeds the ashen embers once again