Category: Brigid’s Diary
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2302: The Liturgy of Light
Part 3, Liturgy for the Light That Was Not Ours(One border that’s only another) I. The Carriage as CrucibleThe wheels sang agony in vowels.Every jolt a verdict, every rut a reckoning.We counted time by froth at the horses’ mouths,in the shudder of their ribs.Safety was Lyon, we whispered to ourselves,the lie turning prayer by repetition.…
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1702: Ash and Interleaf
Part 2: Of Ash and Interleaf — from Brigid’s Diary: Paris, 17 February 1833 The pages between here and the turn of the Seine have been removed, fed to the fire, their spines cracking like small bones. Felreil says Paris is a danger made of touchpaper and of men who read silence as a lip-wet…
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1602: The Liturgy
Liturgy for Those Who Burned Their Names to Stay Alive(for the ones who fled too late) I. The First Mistake of BelievingYou thought the river would wash you clean.You thought the new tonguewould taste sweeter in your mouth. That the accent you couldn’t shedwould be mistaken for poetry,not origin. But fear travels without papers.It crossed…
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1002: Six Sentence Story
Passport Interrogation Part 1, Calais, 12 November 1830 The paddle-wheeler pitched us into France; the quay fatigued by tides, received us without welcome, smelling of coal and old salt. Under a dripping lamp the policeman collected our passports like birds he meant to keep, and we surrendered them as one surrenders breath to winter. Felreil,…
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0902: The Liturgy
Liturgy for the Provisional Passport (a hymn for the unmoored and ink-stamped, waiting) I. The Arrival Without WelcomeThe quay,it tolerates you.Coal-smoke and old salt.A lamp hissing in the rainan unwilling guard.You step from the paddle-wheeler’s pitchonto stone that has forgotten how to welcome.This is not a border crossed,but a threshold endured. II. The Surrender of…
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4 Feb: Six Sentence Story
Brigid’s Diary: Prologue Brigid’s Diary: Prologue — 12 November 1830Note: Set before the dated pages that follow. We left England before the crows could count us, a small arithmetic of breath and bread. The field-reapers and threshers learned new names for old hungers; men with clean hands arrived asking who tended the sick, the broken…
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