they told us, the stones and parchments, they told us of undead days and songs sung from the tunnels and hands reaching from the mire like a great breaking dawnscape where all the rays keep fingers and the sun yawns strange reds and blacks, as a hole in the ground yawns of far below. they told us of waters rising to our heads, of the glitter sharpened on their currents, of the axe brought to our door.

even smaller her hands, even less what she could hold, and from them spilled the sight of dogs and massacre, the swords fallen out of sheaths, the iron boots of battalion, the thatching of poor roof, the words we can still talk, we can still stand together. and when she closed even more slipped from their little holdings--old hands of the mother, dirty bandages, naked wounds, dulled eyes, breaths.

children watched at the waterside, with tatters of smoke in their hands and in their hair, saying with glasswide stares which one of these should i be weeping over, it was so long ago the city marched off to war i cannot remember faces and caresses. she descended among them, letting it run up to her waist with a pawing and a tugging, and said i will remember for you, i will remember every family.

on horn and quarrystone the dogs sat snarling, old hairless haunches still tough with wartime and teeth sharpened to their yellows, awaiting the call to jump, lash out, strike at the soft underbelly armor. and even though she had seen them as pups, she had scratched their ears and felt their licks in return, her steps before them trembled, for they smelled meat and their hunger drooled glistening.

they headed along the dogtrack, the unseen walls that had kept low horrors in and the stink of plaindwellers out. but when they had at last found iron and learned to form armor and spears the dogs could not keep them out and the watch fell with a yelp and a running and the stains soaked into quarry brick and widemouthed rivers and the dogtrack filled with sandals and boots, as the two on it now, crossing back and staring down into the blackened valley.

ribboning over skin, the sound as knots opened and breathed out, as fingers untwine from their guards and fall to the sides. she had no carapace this time--only the gossamers of long fabric wingstitched to their joints, paper in soft bright cocooning wound and wound until only round shades hinted at elbows, hips, breasts, hints that grew color with each unveil, each spin, each sharpening.

steps on steps, the force of jumpboot and riotwalls but together we make a rhythm, we make a song as thunder would crack through pitches one rumbling to another, as tornadoes add clouds upon clouds but always keep striations, because even in the end when there are a thousand hands punching each is a tremble, a drop, a jump, and each has found tonight, found others, found us.

it remained in those thrown shadows of closet, in those ghosthaunts between dresses and the little slip of remembrance. pearl and stitched silk, wide-eyed embroidery to drink the color out of her face and leave only blanched truth, deathless innocence, a jugdmental nude like some jarred autopsy, chemicaled down to oilkept skin and the strings of muscles fine as threads pulled to the lipless oaths.

soft hat talk, the king muffled with a brim held between our faces as if the polish out on the streets reads lips and counts them together, like one atom added between a string of others until what emerges is soft and silvery, crackling and kissed radioactive, with the secretive plans acid on the surface and the unspoken destruction locked within, the kind made when one body strikes another.

let the dogs take the hilltop, she said in the glisten of a spat night and the swordwarmth of the war fires, let them have their charge and their black walls and the first taste of the cold air kept in the whitehearted lungs of those demons, let them say they were the ones first upon northern soil and the first to dip their blades in blood, we shall be the ones telling stories at the end.