Excavation

I press my hands into the ruins of you, fingertips cut in the quiet rot of ancient wounds that have never quite been touched. Beneath splintered ribs, your earth is sulfurous in suffering— your volcanic pulse muffled under sediment, heart-rages arrested in amber. I carve through your marrow-deep dusks, knuckles bloodied on the bedrock of guilt, digging past rusted veins and forgotten altars, until my hands unearth something promethean and glinting— not relic, not wreckage— but soft golds of you, burning like a mantra like a last prayer. 3.8.24