The Temple
The spires are lit by a low flame. Behind you,
a chorus of lamentations in the dark.
Approach the temple’s wide gate and begin
praying to the living. Be with the mystery
that cloaked itself in images.
The teeth missing from the saint’s skull
are collected on a string. Wear them close
to your thin body. When last were you beckoned
to the wilderness for a terror to behold
and resist? You could have been anything,
but you have been chosen to walk through the gate
as the world’s only daughter, aglow with solitude
and held up by a lean hope. Remove from your body
the desire for a useful love, and the plague
of angels will no longer haunt you. Only a fool
can tell the king the truth, and you lie to survive,
like everything mysterious. When your right hand
rises to the center of your chest to join the left
you find you have forgotten to kneel.
How can you hope to hear the howling that is God
when nothing around you is on fire?
The Prison
This cell once held the slave
who told the king he was mortal.
This one protected the people
from the man who murdered
his six sons. Someone
is singing. No one is here.
The stone is darkly stained,
but no matter to you. You still enter
the windowless room where
the inquisitor broke a suspect’s fingers.
Because they were your fingers.
Because that’s where you confessed
that you were no better
than the torturer. Nothing will save you
from the prison of memory.
Can you see the broken light,
striking twin perihelia?
The world is cold now; stay behind
these stones. After all,
a woman’s freedom is different
from a man’s and more wild.
I’ve seen you roam the forest,
your mouth glistening. What power
burns beneath your silence? To keep
yourself safe, dig every body
out of the dungeon. Ready yourself
for the thousand wanting bones
in the walls. Resurrection
is an old art, and the most savage
of all possible joys.
The Museum
After the great destruction, looters came with their loose eyes
and desire for oil and marble.
They wanted beauty in her old disguises, like statues of
ancient cities before
they were taken by marauders. The fractured hands before you
belong to the conquered gods.
The tapestry in the hall tells an old legend, the tale of the woman
warrior with her twisted dagger,
and the many arrows in her quiver that warmed themselves in
the bodies of her enemies.
Here lies her spear and shards of the hunted. When you roam
the dark corridors bring her weapons
made from molten and steel, for once men stole their brides
mistaking possession for love.
Hide your body in her armor. Hide your heart in an empty grave.
When you leave here, take nothing.
Fountain
Water drowns your panic like a Sunday blessing.
It’s spring. The sky above you darkens with rain.
You think passion is your only gift, but a sadness
older than the sea keeps time in your blood.
Once you saw two skeletons locked in a kiss.
Time has forgotten them. Time forgets
everything except the swan’s neck reflected
in the dark fountain and the way it cried out
its silver anthem of loneliness. Do not drink
from here. The water looks cold and clean
but clarity like that only leads to madness.
Remember when you came here with the one
who held your body even as it changed
beneath his hands and waited for you to
renounce the world? You will never renounce it. 
Traci Brimhall is a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her manuscript Rookery won the 2009 Crab Orchard Series First Book Award and is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press.
Brynn Saito’s poetry has been anthologized in Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, 3rd ed., and From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas 1900-2002, edited by Ishmael Reed. Her work has also appeared in Pleiades, Harpur Palate, and Copper Nickel. In 2008, she was awarded a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship at the University of Virginia.
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