After the first collapse, the room grew wet.
Forms softened. Walls began to breathe you back.
Love taught you how to close around a threat,
how to invoke terror, keep it smooth, intact.
We could not cut the sickness to the bone—
it nested where the mouth learns how to seal.
Each breath became a vow you made to him;
each vow, a shape the body had to feel.
You made the mask obscene enough to hold:
all lips and chambers, dotted into trance,
a face that learned how beauty molds its own.
Your husband held you there, his maddening dance.
What burned was not the mind, but what we spare—
the mask’s wet hinge—where breath corrupts to prayer.