The Angel of Confession

For touching what wasn’t mine— even though I didn’t want it, even though I gave it back— I lost my fingers. The press called us demonic but they, my ten thin fates, were innocent as fire in search of fuel, & I in my disguise as oxygen couldn’t let them go out. We shattered windows to let more world into those narrow shrines to whatever. We broke in aorta by aorta, cavorting like a virus, smashing the attenuated plaster antibodies in our excess of what I thought was joy. How they writhed & curled in it! How they shook & shuddered into ash.