Golgotha

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Flayed flat, a lion, a night burnished bright.

There was a sea of cloth and fang. There was a woman

who sang all night, a single note the birds caught

in their beaks. There was a miracle or there wasn’t.

There was the holy spectacle of belief. The people swore

it meant something, the way they shook, the way terror

thorned through the trees, but everything continued to exist,

flat as a painting, as the open breaking through a wound.

There was a sky. The blue-lipped the worms did their work.

The people looked at each other and saw ignition, their own

terrors crowning them in perfect, piercing arrows of flame.