It is dusk. A corner of the universe peels open & a god peers through. The baby in the wicker basket returns down the Nile unable to deny destiny. He must eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge. He must hear the screams of his people as they march towards annihilation. & though he has wandered with their voices on his tongue for 60 years, he is yet to find a body to wear their trauma with. Their ashes blink in the wind, fodder for the hungers, he once said were human. These carnivores! These corrupted shapes emerging from the void with clean words.
The prophet must acknowledge that without body, the soul would die. That he wears his often tortured body to save memory, to remember yesterday, to remind tomorrow.
There, where the fire burns & hunger scrapes the floor with tin spoons & cracked lips, a body hears the beating in the sea, the invite, the shore wet with tender welcome. It is their lover's face that falls from heaven. They draw her from memory with a pole & a stringed hook. They call her all the names of her deification then let her carry them into her dreaming.
They stare at a god. What is love if not sacrifice? They give their voices to the wind, to carry their soul back home to the doorstep.
"Mother, we are home," they say inside the rustle of leaves & flapping of wings.
They quieten the grief on walls, caressing the cracked stones, breaking the surf of tears chewing through the door. Who will come to the door? Who will welcome them to their favorite chair near the window where they once watched the world pass by.
"I told him not to go," mother speaks through her wine soaked sweat.
She is weary & it shows. The hunger pushes them forward & finally, a family sits burdened with the quick passing of day. They stand when news wanders drunken into the grieving & the slow blues of silence becomes a wailing piano in the night.
At sea, their lover caught in their sacrifice, a body watches the moon descend into the heat left by the sun & drinks deep the husk. Someone is praying. The son wanders from his tomb to find the devil was one of his disciples. A body chokes on seafoam, wakes to silence, the sea brighter than the sky. Merpeople flicker like fireflies around them. They crown a body with silver, robe them in starlight then lead them to their cross again & again.
They struggle inside the lichens, they beg for thirst to quench their dying then they call a god by name. They struggle from her grip, her hungry screams tearing them like sharp stones. Is this how another martyr finds legend? No! A body tears free, slave no more to that wet sweet place. They fall on the rocky shore. A body finds their self on the shore, grabs hold of their skin & welcomes it home.
They wander through that corner of the universe under a god's eavesdropping eye.
"I'm home mama," they say.
There is alleluia. They unsee a body with horror. Lazarus still reeks of the grave, saltwater & lichen on their wrists. They sit & listen & after a long while, not really long to be honest in that clean morning, they begin again to hunger for the dusk.