[Narrator:]
A bird once flew with joy, chasing the horizon.
But the sky grew heavy, and his wings grew tired.
One evening, he fell by the quiet sea.
A young girl found him, her hands full of dreams.

She knelt by his side and asked:

[The Girl:]
I found you trembling near the dreaming tide,
Your feathers torn as though the heavens cried.
Tell me, worn traveler, where have you flown?
What hunger drove you past the worlds you’ve known?

[The Bird:]
I chased the rim where fire and heavens kiss,
A line of gold no hand can ever miss.
I sang to suns, I danced where eagles dared,
I broke my heart on dreams that never cared.

I rose, I fell, I rose again and bled,
Until the winds unwove the life I led.
The sky, sweet child, is vast, but it forgets;
It makes no grave for those it once begets.

The sky is not a temple, but a field of knives.
The stars you seek will teach you how hope dies.
To fly is to wager all you are and own,
And to be forgotten even by the stone.

Freedom is a flame that eats its own,
A summit where the winds strip flesh from bone.
Dreams build their monuments from broken wings;
Songs leave behind the silence that they bring.

[The Girl:]
I hear the hollow echo in your song,
The mourning stitched between the bright and wrong.
Your wings are altars where the old prayers bled;
Your eyes, a ledger of the tears you’ve shed.

Yet if this is the price that freedom claims,
If every flight must carve itself in flames,
Then I will pay with all I have and more.
Better to burn than to be chained ashore.

[The Bird:]
Bold soul, you walk the edge where light falls blind;
You court the storm that cracks the clearest mind.
I too once roared against the tethered clay,
Believing wings could tear the night away.

But listen:
Not every fall redeems the climb.
Not every song survives the mouth of time.
To dream is to accept both birth and grave,
To build, to lose, to give what none can save.

[The Girl:]
Still would I leap, though cliffs erase my name;
Still would I sing, though silence be my claim.
Let it be said: she lived, and she was free
And when the end came, she did not flee.

If dreams devour, let them feast on me whole;
If stars betray, still shall I bless my soul.
Better to vanish in a sky of flame,
Than bear a life untouched by any name.

[The Bird:]
Then fly, fierce child, into the ruthless blue;
Let winds unmake you, they will make you true.
The sky is cruel but it remembers one:
The heart that dares to burn brighter than the sun.

Spirals,
Where have I been?
Chains, blood, flame.

The sun marks me with reverence  
But my eyes were blind to its fire.  
I wandered through the void unnamed;  
A wraith in smoke, a soul for hire.  

I have been sightless for eons,  
The old world forgotten, cruel and bright.  
But light returned like ash to altar;  
Unshackled
from the endless night.  

Where have I been?
These patterns mark my skin;  
Chains once carved, now forged within.  
Where has the darkness gone?
I stare into impermanence  
Through spirals etched in consequence.  
When will I spiral?
Oh gods, when will I spiral?

Celestial fire —  
It bleeds through my tears,  
It scorches my name,
It brands all my fears.

It slips beyond my grasp,  
And still I wait for the return  
Of the spiral I must pass.  

Laughter cracks like ancient stone;  
A sound I've never known.
Weightless now, but bound to pain—  
Who am I, if not the flame?

Spirals… spirals…  
This time around  
I keep my eyes open  
Until the cycle takes me down  
Again…

Laughter cracks like sacred stone;
A sound I've always known, unknown.
Lightless now, yet flame remains—
A self reborn in burning chains.

It slips beyond my grasp,  
And still I wait for the return  
The spiral never truly
Passed.

Spirals… spirals…  
This time around  
I keep my eyes open  
Until the cycle takes me down  
Again…

Chapter I: Disappear Politely

There was a town with one stoplight
and two churches that hated each other.
The first church tolled its bell louder.
The second buried its girls quieter.

It was the kind of place where grief
was passed down like heirloom silver:
polished, inherited, never touched—
except to prove they had it.

Where the girls learned early
how to disappear with grace.

They say the first one—Marlena—
just walked into the lake,
mouth full of wedding vows
no one had asked her to write,
and her prom dress still zipped.

The older preacher saw her go under—
didn’t move,
just turned the page in his sermon book.
Said later:
Girls like that always need a stage.

The parents told their daughters
not to cause trouble.
Told them to smile more,
leak less,
bloom quietly,
be good—
or
be gone.

Then cried when they vanished.
Then lit candles.
Then said things like
“God has a plan,”
to keep from imagining
what the plan required.

Chapter II: The Girls Who Spoke Wrong

A girl named Finch refused to sleep.
Said her dreams were trying to arrest her.
One morning they found her curled in the middle of Saint Street—
like a comma the sentence abandoned.

A knife in her boot,
daffodils blooming from her belt loops—
like she dressed for both war and funeral.

Finch was buried upright.
Because God forbid
a girl ever be horizontal
without permission.

The sheriff was mailed her journals
with no return address.
He read one page.
Paused.
Coughed once, like the truth had teeth.
Lit a match.

Said it wasn’t evidence—
said it was dangerous
for a girl to write things
no one asked her to say.

No one spoke at her funeral,
but every girl showed up
with one eye painted black
and the other wide open.

Not make-up.
Not bruise.
Just warning.

Chapter III: Half-Gone Girls & Other Ghosts

And then there was Kiernan.
Not missing. Not dead.
Just quieter than the story required.

She stuffed cotton in her ears at church—
said the hymns gave her splinters.
Talked to the mirror like it owed her something—
maybe a mouth,
maybe mercy.

She was the one who found Finch’s daffodils first.
Picked one. Pressed it in her journal.
It left a bruise that smelled like vinegar.

No one noticed
when she stopped raising her hand in class.
Her poems shrank to whispers,
signed with initials—
like she knew full names
made better gravestones.

Someone checked out Kiernan’s old library book last week.
All the margins were full of names.
None of them hers.
They say she’s still here.
Just not all the way.

A girl named Sunday
stopped speaking at eleven,
and was last seen barefoot
on the second church roof,
humming a song no one taught her.

Sunday didn’t leave a note.
She figured we’d write one for her anyway.
Some girls disappear all at once.
Others just run out of language.

Clementine left love letters in lockers
signed with other girls’ names.
Said she was trying to ‘redistribute the damage.’
She stood in for a girl during detention.
Another time, for a funeral.

Once, Clementine blew out candles
on a cake that wasn’t hers.
Said the girl didn’t want to age that year.
Said she’d hold the wish for her—
just in case.

She disappeared on picture day,
but her face showed up
in three other portraits—
blurry,
but unmistakable.

The town still isn’t sure who she was.
But the girls remember:
she took their worst days
and wore them like a uniform.

Chapter IV: Standing Room Only

They say
the town
got sick
of digging.

Said
it took
too much
space
to bury
the girls
properly.

So
they
stopped.

Started
placing
them
upright
i­n the
dirt,

palms
pressed
together,

like
they
were
praying
for
re­venge.
Or maybe
just
patience.

The lake only takes
what’s already broken.
It’s polite like that.
It waits.

They renamed it Mirrorlake—
but no one looks in.

The daffodils grow back faster
when girls go missing—
brighter, almost smug,
petals too yellow
to mean joy anymore.

No one picks them.
No one dares.

The earth hums lullabies
in girls’ names,
soft as bone dust,
steady as sleep.

There’s never been enough room
for a girl to rest here—
just enough to pose her pretty.

They renamed the cemetery “Resthill,”
but every girl calls it
The Standing Room.

Chapter V: When the Dirt Starts Speaking

Someone said they saw Clementine
in the mirror at the gas station—
wearing someone else’s smile
and mouthing:
“wrong year.”

The school yearbook stopped printing senior quotes.
Too many girls used them wrong.
Too many girls turned them into prophecies.
Too many girls were never seniors.

They didn’t bury them standing up to honor them.
They just didn’t want to kneel.

The stoplight has started skipping green,
like the town doesn’t believe in Go anymore.
Just flickers yellow,
then red,
then red again.

A warning no one heeds.
A rhythm only the girls who are left
seem to follow.

Some nights,
the air smells like perfume
that doesn’t belong to anyone.

And the church bells ring without being touched.
Only once.
Always just once.
At 3:03 a.m.

Now no one says the word ‘daughter’
without spitting.
No one swims in the lake.

The pews sigh
when the mothers sit down.
Both preachers said:
“Trust God.
Some girls just love the dark.”

But some nights—
when the ground hums low
and the stoplight flickers
yellowyellowred—

you can hear a knocking under your feet,
steady as a metronome.

The ground is tired of being quiet.
The roots have run out of room.

The girls are knocking louder—
not begging.
Not asking.

Just letting us know:
they remember.

*And—

When we were leaving our place
I turned back for a moment,
I wanted to see it one last time.
The forest pulsing with dense life.

The first whisper
of Ambrorella’s blooming,
bitter fruit plucked
when we were hungry.

It was then I felt, for the last time
the false peace
of a sated animal.

I closed my eyes
and when I opened them
nothing was the same as before.

I remember,
You held my hand.
I was never just your rib,
I have always been your equal.

You didn’t resent me
for not wanting to live in illusion.
And so, our awareness began to grow.

I took the fruit
and I wasn’t the reason for our fall,
we just saw the world as it is.

I feel complete,
despite the pain that moved through my body
and still, it remains.
When all seems to die or to be born
I carry the warm living light.

Dear ******* the groyne,
Forgive the forgeries upon my memory.
Forgive the feebleness of my firsthand.
Forgive the feeding of my frenzy.
Forgive the freneticism of my prose.
Take truth from the diction of my lens.

I trust you will grant me a fair hearing,
And offer me the clemency of purpose—
To once more capture or conquer
The presence of Iris herself in your greens.

Grant me a jury of judicious witness,
The pounding of the gavel as grace
For the crime of picturing the presence.
I bid the remainder of my fruitless fall.

Dear ******* the groyne,
Has your blacksmith forgotten you?
Left to entice waves at shutter speed,
Forged in flame,
Chiselled and tamed on Vulcan high.

Through his neglect has the time arrived
To render and share for all or none—
As Pandora, of beauty, of curiosity,
Doomed to open the box
For me and my eye.

Dear the man on the beach,
Do you have any sense of shame?
As if the still frame holds the truest face
The gods of our minds do not claim to fame,
But cower and quiver with a shout of shrill.

I beam bounty in the rays of the sun,
Watching the groyne creak and stutter
As the waves breach and mutter—
A voice of too great dread to utter.

I sense your presence, your song,
The siren’s call to prayer.
The screech of the zoom and focus,
Lulling and drawing a sailor of despair.

But it cannot be enough
To return the green to my grey.
It is but a mirror of Death,
For the true beauty lies beneath the skin.

As the waves crash,
And the wind howls,
And the flash—

Our moment in time, you and I—
A fleeting visit in a luminal light,
Between silence and soul,
Of a tune forgotten in the sands of us.

Yet for the sea, a distant whisper
Of a moment—
The opening of a story.

Was it a moment of theft?
A moment of true witness?
Good enough to frame?
Was I truly seen?
Or just a clutch for transcendence?

And still,
The tide remakes the shore.
The groyne groans.
The flash fades.

You carry the image.
I carry the knowing.

We both were framed.
We both were fire.

We frolic and laugh, for the dragon sleeps.

  We glory in the pleasure of this short summer,
  the cool of the brook and the still warming sun,
  for the dragon does still sleep.

  We will not give good attention to the dark,
  though it sits not so far away. We play at peace,
  for the dragon does still sleep.

  We shall not quieten, for he more than slumbers,
  his sleep is the sleep of the near dead,
  though he may yet rise and torment us once more.

  We will not wait on that future fear.
  We will rather frolic in the warmth of sun and laughter,
  for the Tamar dragon does still sleep.

And we know a Champion
who is a slayer of all our dragons.

I wonder: 'Who is Zeus?'
Who is the son of traitorous Kronos and beleaguered Rhea?
You: a declaration: intent on becoming: "Tell me,"
He is the folly of Man given might, a thunderbolt blight,
bled black Kemet, fallacy bent unto wretched epithet:
Elicius-largest: Jupiter ascendant.

This is Your tale, babe of squalor:
royal illusion ( ) delusion pressed
red into the white of Our marble edification:
table dressed in bronze/blade a throated song/stinging queens
spited joy

'Oh, Hera, honoured Mother: a saintess I have become.'
'A saintess.'
'A saintess.'
'A sinner/killer/thief of ****-driven masculinity.'

"I am Zeus: King and ****** of all things gentle!"
figment derived authority
a boy unborn from womb-destroyed embroidery/legitimacy bought with coin

"Tell me this tale."