By Cassandra Jordan
You were here once:
I remember, distinct
as the darkness
framing the doorway, the
fluorescent waiting
in the hall.
Down where
the earth’s blood
freezes rivers into
veins across
forgotten skin, where the
cornea of memory
pulses sightless.
You led me, hand in hand,
through those crags of ice and fire,
until the wind-whipped
songs of the unburied
faded into frost and
the stars reappeared
one after another
in the echoing dark.
To descend is easy;
to emerge is not.
Some nights I still reach for you,
call your name in the dark
as the cliffs gape before us
with empty eyes
and hungry mouths.
Cassandra Jordan is a writer living in New York. Her work has recently appeared in Crow & Cross Keys, Hidden Peak Press, Acropolis Journal, Cypress Review, Arlington Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She is interested in the histories beneath history and the stories within stories. She can be found at www.cassandra-jordan.com.