Working Around the Mark

They built a winter inside my chest,
without the mercy of falling snow—
just the iron drop of sudden frost,
and the sound of roots refusing to grow.

They smiled with teeth like polished slate,
and sheared the velvet from the fawn;
they took the light that kept me warm,
and called the theft an early dawn.

It was not a blow of fist or stone,
but an undoing, slow and neat,
like pulling the thread from a living seam,
till the heart fell quiet at their feet.

Now the salt-lines dry upon the floor,
where the ghost of trusting used to bleed.
They hollowed out the temple walls,
and left the dark to take the seed.

And the quiet aches louder than the blade;
a phantom ache in a missing limb.
They walked away into the sun,
while the room they left me in grew dim.