Elizabeth Campbell

There was terror already in her love even before she knew for sure her lover was the god. Her forehead skidded a little on the sweat of his chest and close to his ear Semele begged again for proof. And it didn’t feel like a myth or a metaphor to her as she burned up with the brightness she saw.

Any, every, thing that was exposed goes underground and is washed into the Tiber. This is what some people do with faces, burying. You see them, the heavy ones, chests like rivers, their heads bowed down with great antlers of thought invisible. After many seasons, the fronts of their bodies terribly developed to carry them. Venus of the Drains, the woman with the scum at the corners of her mouth who talked for a long time, scarred by burning, perilous thin, then told us we had made her day. It is seen, what should not be seen. It is I sees it. Shameful, to feel so heavily the shame of others — to hear and echo that note always waiting in the voice to be sung. Do I make it happen to her by having face and chest that wash with red?