In the alabaster hush of a moon that forgot its own reflection,
a visage emerges—porcelain-pale, stretched taut across the scaffolding of some forgotten ossuary—
where the skull beneath the skin has been polished to a glacial sheen,
as though the very marrow of night had been scraped clean and reapplied with a tanner’s knife.
Eyes: two embered slits in a glacier’s heart,
half-lidded with the languor of a seraph who has tasted the ash of forbidden altars,
gazing not outward but inward,
into the cathedral of a throat that swallowed every color except the one it now wears—
a crimson so arterial, so violently ripe,
it drips like molten garnet from lips sculpted by the slow, deliberate cruelty of a god who adores excess.
The mouth: a wound that learned to smile,
a vermillion fissure carved by the scalpel of some celestial taxidermist,
parting just enough to reveal the absence of teeth—
or perhaps teeth so translucent they have become negative space,
a grin that devours light and spits it back as mockery.
Beneath the jawline—sharp as the edge of a guillotine’s memory—
a collarbone rises like the keel of a shipwrecked galleon,
strung with a single thread of silver,
a filament so frail it might be the last remaining tendon of a drowned siren.
The garment: a lattice of alabaster threads,
woven from the shrouds of saints who renounced their names,
clinging to shoulders that have never known the weight of wings,
yet bear the posture of one perpetually on the cusp of ascension—or descent.
This is no mortal countenance.
This is the afterimage of a seraphim who fell upward,
who traded halo for hemorrhage,
who painted the void with the blood of forgotten dawns
and then stepped into the canvas to live inside the wound.
Behold the androgyne of annihilation,
the porcelain apocalypse wearing lipstick like a prophecy,
a face that has outlived gender, flesh, and forgiveness—
smiling the smile of a mirror that finally learned to lie.
a visage emerges—porcelain-pale, stretched taut across the scaffolding of some forgotten ossuary—
where the skull beneath the skin has been polished to a glacial sheen,
as though the very marrow of night had been scraped clean and reapplied with a tanner’s knife.
Eyes: two embered slits in a glacier’s heart,
half-lidded with the languor of a seraph who has tasted the ash of forbidden altars,
gazing not outward but inward,
into the cathedral of a throat that swallowed every color except the one it now wears—
a crimson so arterial, so violently ripe,
it drips like molten garnet from lips sculpted by the slow, deliberate cruelty of a god who adores excess.
The mouth: a wound that learned to smile,
a vermillion fissure carved by the scalpel of some celestial taxidermist,
parting just enough to reveal the absence of teeth—
or perhaps teeth so translucent they have become negative space,
a grin that devours light and spits it back as mockery.
Beneath the jawline—sharp as the edge of a guillotine’s memory—
a collarbone rises like the keel of a shipwrecked galleon,
strung with a single thread of silver,
a filament so frail it might be the last remaining tendon of a drowned siren.
The garment: a lattice of alabaster threads,
woven from the shrouds of saints who renounced their names,
clinging to shoulders that have never known the weight of wings,
yet bear the posture of one perpetually on the cusp of ascension—or descent.
This is no mortal countenance.
This is the afterimage of a seraphim who fell upward,
who traded halo for hemorrhage,
who painted the void with the blood of forgotten dawns
and then stepped into the canvas to live inside the wound.
Behold the androgyne of annihilation,
the porcelain apocalypse wearing lipstick like a prophecy,
a face that has outlived gender, flesh, and forgiveness—
smiling the smile of a mirror that finally learned to lie.
The Sunday Circle