Absencelooks like a lake bed flooded with sky sounds like cotton howling tastes like tear-stained pillows smells like churning bile and burnt hair feels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying

— Beth Morey

Do you dare to step in-to the vulnerable black, stripped to the soul with human blindness – when the full and weeping moon steps from the shade of a tumult of mountains – when, in the fragrant dim, day's tree stump transforms into some nether-worldly other – when time's skin is thin and you are bared – when there is nothing between you and the Wildest One whose name is your own?

— Beth Morey

God, is there no faith left? He has not told. I would not know Him if I saw Him.

— Beth Morey

I am at the gates of my own destruction.(Or, so I'm told.)

— Beth Morey

I hear talk of that slippery slope, and my heart catches for a beat. But there is the musky truth I'm standing in that I can't deny, and it tastes of so much holy. That old way, the narrow line, I see now that was a slippery, saccharine surface where my soul could gain no purchase. For the first time, my feet feel sure beneath me, and that sense is twining its way up from my ankles, racing toward my knees, my thighs, my secret places, my heart. It's in my blood now, and I can't deny it. I can't deny it. I open my eyes, because I could see even through my clutched-closed lids that the darkness is light, that the blindness has given way to searing vision. Furthermore, I can't deny it.

— Beth Morey

Imagine the desert mothers, with hair tangled tighter than their theology and breasts that flowed milk and mystic wisdom. Theyknew how to draw the singingsigils in the sand, how to dig rough and bitten fingers into desiccated dirt for water to wet the lips of their young. Women of hips and heft, who learned how to burn beneath the wild and searing sun, who made loud love against the star-flecked threat of night, who knew that strengths not always a matter of muscle. Imagine your ancestresses, the prophetesses of the arid lands, before these starched traditions and pews too hardtop ray from, who bled true ritual and birthed their own fierce souls at creation's crowning --

— Beth Morey

I stand in my own power now, the questions of permission that I used to choke on for my every meal now dead in a fallen heap, and when they tell me that I will fall, I nod. I will fall, I reply, and my words are a whispery words are a howl will fall, I say, and the tumbling will be all my own. The skinned palms and oozing knees are holy wounds, stigmata of my She. I will catch my own spilled blood, and not a drop will be wasted.

— Beth Morey

I wonder what freezes the flurry of hurt on her cold-flushed cheeks, if his touch ISA salve or the shattering.

— Beth Morey

Now I'm blinking in a new gloaming and all I see as I'm stretched low down Paris a world of women flat on their frozen faces. We are the ground itself, corporeal carpet of cells, softness calloused hard beneath the pebbled soles of the fatherland husbands and brothers and priest sand it's a horror if you could see it, a world of women ruined by man's fear.

— Beth Morey

The mind is a treasure trove, an almanac, a tomb.

— Beth Morey