I am offered no mask, no armor,
only a ticket and the instruction
to keep walking.
I feel the pressure change
with the invocation of a prophetess
I’d not yet read,
finding my way back
to air blackened
with the depths of history
kept under,
every step asking
my lungs to breathe in
a new language.
Not like a fly on the wall
I crawl down the Passage’s ladder
to the keel of the wreck
in search of the damage done.
I circle, we circle, you circle silently
among the drowned faces
whose open eyes haunt
not tentatively
not anonymously
insisting their names
become the map itself
the myth was written
in cowardice
to obscure.
