Voltage Woman

Goodness arrived first as a room without handles,
polished, narrow, airless,
built for the sort of woman who could fold her hunger
until it passed for grace.

Saints watched from their niches,
marble mouthed and gold throated,
their eyes lifted away from blood, laundry, heat,
all the private weather of a body made useful.

Beyond the walls, bass moved through the floorboards.
A low current entered the ankle,
travelled bone by bone,
struck the heart’s black match
and left the ribs bright with alarm.

No temple trusted a woman standing upright.
Every house invented a lock eventually.
Still, she rose with music in her marrow,
mouth lit from old injury,
hands clean enough to be dangerous.

Anger came dressed with precision,
silk over iron, salt at the lip,
a blade kept immaculate for years
beneath the velvet hush of obedience.

Cruel, they said,
but the word fell short.
Difficult, perhaps,
though even that split open
and scattered sparks across the floor.

Denied the sky,
she learned height from lightning.
Thunder became a tutor inside the lungs.
Her body turned signal,
pulse, aperture,
a sanctified disturbance
in the machinery that preferred her quiet.

Permission lost its authority.
Adoration looked too small.
Fear could not keep pace.

By morning the locked rooms
had heard her frequency.
At dusk the dark made space,
because force recognises force.

Then the sky split.

Voltage tore through brick, blood, glass,
through every mouth
that had tried to make her smaller.

Her name burned upward,
white and furious,
striking the rafters of heaven
with both hands full of fire.

Locks burst hot from their sockets.

obedience caught flame.