Taylor Reese Poet Free verse

Thigh Psalms:

Crumb
             li
                ng
Beneath the deadweight of a broken dream.
Scared, I mean scarred enough to make the novocaine scream.

Fal
       l
          en
Are the feathers of an angel's wing,
Treated like an animal.
Another broken thing—
And I tied my cilice myself,
With the same hands that made a noose to reenact the times I almost drowned.

With every step I take, I raise a tiny hallelujah—
As the cilice bites my thighs and no one knows.
No one knows the paean I'm humming,
the red excoriation blooming under denim.
The way every barb kisses my skin like a lover
who doesn't ask for dinner first.

The cilice is my parish,
Every crimson bead is an unanswered prayer.
And here I genuflect before a god of pain,
Then come the vespers at the porcelain alter.
Pouring out scriptures written in acid,
While enacting kenosis as the holy water swirls away.

Absolution circles clockwise, Down a throat of porcelain. Somewhere beneath the floorboards Heaven has a drainage system.
And with a growl I say amen.

If this is salvation,
Why does it taste like violence?

     ~Kynsie~

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Alison A Smith October 6, 2026 at 11:24 PM The fractured typography of “Crumbling” and “Fallen” makes the words enact their own collapse, while the longer lines give the confession an urgent, breathless momentum. The religious imagery conveys the painful entanglement of suffering, shame, and a longing for absolution. That final question lands with stark force, challenging everything the speaker has called salvation.