i.
your shoulder blades bend themselves back into wings,
your spine bows under the curved chapel roof ;
ii.
you say gabriel visits you in your sleep,
tells you with to cold eyes and bared teeth soaked in crimson
that you are the messiah,
before speaking about the end of the world,
the ichor in your palms.
red hyacinth dust drifts off his eyelashes,
and apathy falls off his tongue like boiling blood.
iii.
for the next month, there are bruises on your elbows and the remnants of a dead language rattling in your lungs. you wake up in the river, thighs carved with sigils and crows perching on your shoulders, weeping ichor and ancient clay. the names of your newfound kin ring in your ears until your partner confesses that you scream them in your sleep.
iv.
Gabriel visits again, six months after you
realize that your native language has
slipped from your tongue and realize that seclusion is more of a gift than another cross for you to bear, afterwards, you tell me that he had four sets of wings, three eyes, and seventeen hearts, and the most unusual feature was the trembling in his steps, his inability to remain still as he phased in and out of this world into another.
v.
you say his reverence was a holy march, a fragment of bone, an aching lung.