Oubliette
I. Sedimentary
Before the oubliette took root in me,
there was only ocean.
Salt. Pressure. Dark.
Trilobites scuttled through prehistory,
belemnites spiralled in slow surrender,
crinoids flared like saline stars.
Graptolites—inked ghosts of collapse—
etched the sediment’s spine.
The body learns early
to forge pain into stone.
II. Orbitals
For twenty-seven days, twenty-seven nights,
he orbited—not with gravity’s grace,
but cold ritual, boots creaking
on the salt-worn deck,
reading breath as consent,
stillness as an unlatched gate. My husband, flesh turned ghost,
sat beside me, then dissolved.
We hid on a ship
bound nowhere but forward.
III. Erosion
“Where’s the shame if you both consent?” he said,
as if silence could sign a deed.
He cast Ulster, 1991, in shadow,
as myth,
not crime. I hold only shards:
flung like a rag doll,
pelvis compressed,
a pause where he salted the wound,
stroking ruin to rewrite it.
IV. Recurrence
December. My sixties.
No prelude. No kiss.
Only force—
hands, rough as scorn,
ripping my skirt’s seam.
As if the loop never broke,
the archive ever open. At a righteous call—her voice sharp—he flinched,
shunned my touch,
cast me to sink in salt’s sting.
The false dervish stilled his dance.
VI. Faultline
I screamed down the line:
False protector.
Charity’s no penance.
Betrayer,
abuser of women,
I pity the pillar you wed,
turned salt by your backward glance.
“Sorry!” he spat,
a word dissolved to salt.
Then silence.
Veiled lies, blurred truths,
another call to law, slipped.
Yet my voice, a fossil, begins to sing.
VII. Fossil Record
He will not claim me.
He will not clutch his trophy.
Too small to grasp my whole,
He hoarded me like contraband,
to break and cradle,
but I am no archive. The oubliette is not of brick.
It is belemnites, sealed in salt,
fossils that sing
what pressure forges.
VIII. Excavation
Here, I built his oubliette:
a hollow sealed by sea and spine,
where the unworthy dissolve,
not punished, but erased. Let him dissolve:
to molecules of cowardice,
to rot’s faint whisper in the tide,
to dust history exhales,
unnamed. Not forgiven.
Not forgotten.
Just no longer held.
And I rise, flint in the chalk.
The tide rolls in,
smoothing the stone of me.