The Strangled Heart

Poetry and Prose by Britt Wolfe

There was a time I thought love indestructible—
a cathedral raised stone by stone within me,
its arches high enough to echo eternity.
But your hands—unseen, relentless—
slipped around the tender chambers of my chest,
a grip too deliberate to be accident,
too intimate to be anything but cruelty.

You did not cut.
You constricted.
You cinched the marrow-song of me
until breath became memory,
until affection was starved into silence.

Love, once a river,
curled in on itself,
choked to a rivulet,
then a gasp.
I watched it die in increments,
each pulse throttled smaller,
each beat a confession:
I cannot survive this touch.

What astonishes is not that I bled out,
but that the body can continue
when the heart is strangled,
when devotion collapses in on itself
like a lung punctured,
like a voice pressed down beneath water.

And so I bury what was sacred—
the cathedral fallen,
the river run dry,
the very name of you
now a blade in my throat.

There are griefs too exquisite for tears,
too monstrous for forgiveness.
Yours was the violence
that did not bruise skin
but asphyxiated the soul,
leaving nothing behind
but the sound of love’s final breath
gasping in the hollow you made.

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