First prize

I Carried Him

by Martin Seare

I watched the lion stumble.  
Not in some slow fall from grace—  
but a vicious tearing down.  
His body, once god-like in strength,  
betrayed him in silence, in swelling, in stillness.  
His breath thick with carbon, skin screaming with sores,  
and still—  
he was my king. 

Doctors whispered him dead with eyes that never saw me.  
Nurses fussed and fumbled,  
measuring his days in drips and charts,  
while I stood vigil  
on the cliff between this world and the next. 

He slipped,  
and I caught him. 

Not with hands of marble—  
no.  
I caught him with shaking palms and blistered knees.  
With prayers screamed in the dark  
and sheets wrung from sweat and sobbing. 

I bathed the wounds.  
I kissed the fever.  
I spoke to the man inside the ruin,  
told him:  
You do not leave me.  
I will drag you from the edge  
with nails, with love, with rage.  
Because without you, I am airless.  
I am spine without bone.  
I am not alive if you are not. 

They told him he’d never walk.  
But he walked.  
Because I stood behind him,  
spirit braced like stone—  
my belief louder than death,  
louder than the pitiful prophecies  
of white coats and cold machines. 

I saw him reborn,  
not in a cradle of ease,  
but with blood in his mouth and fire in his eyes.  
He stood because I willed the sun to rise for him.  
Because my love  
was the breath in his broken lungs. 

You see—  
I did not marry a man.  
 

I married war.  
I married resurrection.  
And I am not just wife.  
I am battleground.  
I am temple.  
I am nurse, priestess, lover, Mother and shield. 

So let them marvel.  
Let them whisper of miracles.  
But know this—  
He walks because I carried him.  
And I will carry him  
again  
and again  
until the stars forget to shine.