an empire is only as great as its ghost.

Poem

By Rebekah Chia

i.

rome began to fall from the moment it was

built, burgeoning on the burning blood of

myth. an empire for the gods. we looked at

copper-stained idols and false-ruins and saw:

an abattoir most beautiful. a tragedy most

glorious. a prayer

much too divine.

when rome fell, it didn’t. its tongues still etched

in the grooves between our teeth, its god still here

in the mausoleum of our worship. we tore Him out

from heaven with two hands collapsed together —

only this time it’s not rapture.

rome didn’t start to fall until long after it was gone.

ii.

i used to dread the apocalypse; i’ve learned to dream

of it — the noise and the quiet, the surge of poetry

in my blood. thought i could love the corpse of the world

more than i could love it like this, wrapped in tender

steel touch. that maybe once the ash settles it’ll be close

enough to dust, that i could carve the shape of my bones

out from it still, that the wireframe skeleton of me is

sturdy enough to feast on. etch into the loam. i used to

dream of the apocalypse. i didn’t wake up until long after

it had arrived.

i don’t remember that night. somewhere along the road

from babylon i fell through some cracks in pitter-patter

sunburst, tripped on scarlet string, wrung out to dry on

a headstone. the world ended and i woke up a little more

wrinkled. aching. it wasn’t that everything else had

crumbled to ash; i just didn’t realise where we’d gone

until i saw the ghost of the empire we used to be,

haunting echo chambers in its crumbling ruins, and

it was no longer calling out my name.

iii.

colossus was pulled down, dipped into pyre.

we turned a man into a king into a god and

then we turned him into a cooking pot. or pan.

we ate from the innards of a deity we killed

and threw his name out to the howling winds.

when i look at you these days, i see: a prayer

still halfway lodged in the back of my throat.

iv.

when rome fell, it didn’t. i never lost you, either.

see — pick up the phone. hear my voice

bounding back from a lifetime away. when i say

hello, know that we are not the kingdoms

we once thought ourselves to be. know that

when i say i miss you, i don’t mean come back.

i understand it now: the world is ending all of the time.

we are building tombs out of these bricks and stones

we hold so dearly. we are violent things, see — not

made to bleed but to feed on burning ichor. we are not

gods, we are worse things yet. and the irony is that we

survived. whatever world ended before us. we survived.

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Rebekah Chia is an emerging young writer and dreamer by nature. Hailing from a tiny little island called Singapore, she has chased her passion for stories all the way to London, where she is currently studying English literature. Her poetry has also been published in the Eunoia Review, as well as in Pi Magazine, her university’s student newspaper.