Beat

An amniotic lake within me
and you, floating

then the deafening silence,
static nothingness where I

expected sound.

For a week I am a shipwreck
not split open on rocky shores
but a vessel sunk
with all its people inside.

Grief is a veil that rustles with the breeze.
My body does not know how to register
death, to let go of decay.

And yet
I cannot think
of you as decay
only as the origin of all things,
cell upon cell built from the sea
or the stars,
depending on who you ask.

And you. I name
for a constellation
so that when I look up I
can find you inked into the sky.

the bone daughter, Resurrected

In a court of greenery
she breathes again
a cape of flowers swaying in time
to her regal step–

whole in her own way,

she is silent now
as she walks through the hillsides
for she is filled with the essence
of living beings:

fluttering wings and baby’s breath,
monarch butterflies that linger
upon the smooth white of her skull.

look now upon this Flower Queen–
chin high, radiant
free
the dust of jangling bones
reborn.

Faith Cotter is originally from Pittsburgh, PA, but now travels the world as a U.S. Foreign Service spouse. She is the recipient of a 2010 Society of Professional Journalists National Mark of Excellence Award, among other regional and local awards for journalism. Her poems have appeared in the Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Time of Singing magazine, ZO Magazine, the Madwomen in the Attic’s Voices from the Attic anthology, the Mid-Atlantic Review, and the 2025 London Writers’ Salon Writing In Community anthology. She has an MA in Professional Writing from Chatham University, and has lived in London, DC, and now Amman, Jordan.

Image: Taxiarchos228, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons. Author photo by Luz Velasquez