When I can see the wholeness of the moon, though only a crescent is lit white;
when I call to the head of a seal between two small hills of water;
when the black outline of rising distant ground and the scribbling of trees blackens
against a no-longer-blue-not-yet-black sky,
then come to me, come to me.
Dress me for death in stolen seal skin.
Give me layers of skirts with black lace at their hems
and the swish of a nun’s habit,
swish of a friar’s hem,
and the black of a stone polished and recumbent on a grave.
Fill my hands with rope-burn and ash.
Fill my mouth. Fill my mouth, greedy wind.
Fill the ventricles of my heart and the heart of the stone beehive.
Come to me, faith.
Come to me faith in ancestors, come with faith that makes
mountains and mouths of the land, dragging stones, floating stones,
rolling stones large as faith.
I will never speak of skin again
or ask skin for any benison beyond knitting itself back together.
I will stay, dance, light fires, break ground, lay my body down.
I will spill you, my darkness, from the murk of my mouth.
I will make you a body.
We will open together beyond the white-quartz porches.
There will be lambs.
There will be light.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 4.
Devon Miller-Duggan’s books include Pinning the Bird to the Wall (Tres Chicas, 2008), Alphabet Year (Slant, 2017), and Slow Salute (Lithic Press, 2018). She lives in Delaware, which, once the oceans rise, will probably be the smallest state since it has more below-sea-level land than Rhode Island. She has recently taken up embroidery after an inexplicable 3-decade hiatus and is trying to figure out how to be an Abstract Expressionist embroiderer.
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