Emily Vance Brown

There was a game you played as a child: 

After swimming, lying 
fetal on your side 
on the hand-me-down towel, 
she outlined whispers
of words along your spine. 
You never guessed right.
You never held in your mind 
more than a singular shape, 
divine. 

Can you feel it yet?

Three letters. God? 
Sometimes, and then
others Satan, saint or 
demon. Like Lot’s wife, 
sacrificed on a whim
to the memories of minor 
men for whom heaven is 
but a will to bend: rubble, 
amen! 

At least Eurydice had a name,

as ordinarily mundane and
incomplete as the 3:16s
you prayed to, painstakingly 
finger-painted in dirt on the 
back of a trailer. Dust echoes
ashes. You remember Pompeii, 
where words froze in women’s 
gaping mouths without 
escape.

Immobility by means of immutability,

Breathless, fleeting, your 
heartbeat sinking deeper 
still, deeper still, until 
the last thread of conscious 
thought is washed up 
like a weed against the shore, 
pulled, retreating, and 
returned to the spray of the 
sea.