At dawn, the butchered bellow their end songs. Undo us with eyes, low and nodding. Plod between the fences, down the final line to the barn.  Long before the labyrinth, there were clear mornings, my mother in her apron, the table set precariously with eggs and flowered china. Her hands tucking my hair behind my ears, this fear of the fields that stretched beyond the house.  Before the labyrinth, we tucked our feet under our covers and dreamed the yard covered in clover, the lovers in their rusted cars at the end of the road. My brother’s breath moving his sheet over his face as I watched, waiting for the world to go dark.

*

A man built his wife a maze and inside that maze, a house.  Inside that house, another maze. The twisted path to her heart rife with briar patch and thistle.  There she waits, hands in her lap, for him to find her, for the children to appear at her knee, miraculous, clean as the day they were born.  Waits for love, something fierce whistling through the walls and up into her chest. But it never comes.  Only beetles lining the window ledges and cicadas all summer long.  Only traces of mud and blood in the sink.  The path that leads to the center rough weather and nothing to tether.

*

Say the word story and the tale unwinds like a rope. How we held hope like a  box on our knees until the bad weather had passed, huddled in the storm cellar, the heat our bodies steaming over flashlights and empty canning jars. Every spring, god come round to deliver a reckoning. A wreckage of gas stations and street signs bent into  v’s, the trees snapped like matchsticks.   How the lightning flickered through the crack in the trap door. My father at the top of the steps, his fingers tight around the latch.  Who’d have known we were open raw to rain and wind, the hatch of our mouths birthing worse things than ruin.