[poem text: Once, I wagered my soul on the promise of eruption, that some grand detonation would hurl me into resplendence, and that only through charred rubble could I be reborn into loveliness. My dreams were of conflagrations—of fireworks and explosions that paint my life in roseate hues. How strange that I mistook calamity for benediction. Hark! the minutiae are sovereign—witness them with me. Reverberant hunger curls its tongue around my ribs, a serpent of unlit phosphor. A sparrow’s wingbeat, ragged and unheralded. Lo, the small fractures of porcelain dawn, seeping like ichor into the seams of my fingernails. Fever dreams drag leave kisses across my throat. Little threads on a cardigan sleeve, fraying into labyrinths, do you not resemble entire histories unwound? I drink mildew from the edge of a cracked chalice, believe it wine, call it holiness, and then retch the syllables into the basin of silence. No one warns that the smallest fracture, a hairline gasp, is more tyrant than detonation. Grain-of-sand sovereignty. Oft I bend to the dust-mote liturgy.
How foolish, to have once expected catastrophe as though collapse were the only midwife of beauty. I waited for apocalypse and missed the divinity in breadcrumbs. Let me forsake cataclysm and kneel before the quiet dominion. If I am to burn, I must first love the kindling, the candleflame, the nearly-nothing. To ignite is not to explode but to bow before the spark, to see it and say: behold, here is beauty, and it is enough. /end poem.]