I opened my mouth to speak, and a throatful of datura glistened on my lips, lavish and ripe,
Thrashing through me, the silken flowers coiled viciously within my windpipe,

My neck was wrung with nightshade, flesh clawed with rashes,
Swollen blotches left my skin blooming and glassy with supple gashes,

Apologies from a verdant jaw trickled out of me like a botanic river,
Yet belladonna still churned in my gut and shrilled within my liver,

Violent coughs racked my body in waves of efflorescence,
And my capillaries burst with burgeoning buds of opalescence,

Ripping my pores apart, petals tore gaping holes in my teeth,
The oral garden of poison flowered like coral fluttering in a fertile reef,
So I looked at myself in the gilded vanity, bruised and young,
Reaching into the reflection, I plucked out my own tongue.

In the temple of unspoken mornings,
a door swings, not ajar but wide—
its hinges weep, long unkissed by oil,
long bent by winds that come from
nowhere.

Do you feel it, too? The way the air
clutches its throat, as though words
have gathered there in clumps of
breathless apology?

This is how time unravels:
slowly, like wet silk pulled
too hard through the eye of a needle.
It frays at the edges, whispers
of all the threads we never wove.

The earth remembers us only as echoes.
Fingers pressed once into
its forgiving skin—
a palmprint gone before
it understands its shape.

Once, I dreamed of rivers:
not the sharp-edged kind
that cut their way through stone,
but rivers made of shadows,
of choices we left behind
to drown.

And what are we,
but the sum of our silences?
The rooms we entered
and left untouched?

I stand here now,
on the lip of the great dark,
and the stars—oh,
the stars—
bend low to meet me.

I wonder if they, too,
are waiting for
a voice that doesn’t
break
when it speaks.

The threshold murmurs underfoot,
a breath of welcome,
or warning, or both.
This is the place where endings
begin—
where even the smallest light
is an earthquake
in the soul.

Darkness is slowly fading her light is slowly making its way back to her she can feel its warmth on her skin she waits for the light to fully embrace her picking her up from the dark he said please don't hate me I was wrong you are the only home I want to know.