Beneath the lake the air tastes of rust and faith and we breathe it 

anyway, as if belief could be oxygen, as if lungs were built to remember 

what they once drowned in. The streets here crack like ribs, light 

struggling to filter through red dirt, through seams in stone. It is raining,

droplets joining the sea, condensation on bones. The flood becomes

a lung opening and closing with our footsteps, a rhythm we remember and

mistake for our own breath. When we stop and listen, the whole

world inhales water, slow and tidal, pulling us closer to earth we will

never touch again. Even the stones here have learned to breathe too

shallow. The flood that drowned us never left, when it learned to whisper we

thought it was memory, sound rushing through pipes filled thick with 

weeds. Then it began to sing, harmonies shaped in the mouth of fish, drowned 

saints, family. It sings names we recognize, hums lullabies that remind

us of stolen children we are certain were ours once. Beneath the lake we dance

in dark water, soft shapes in a glow the light struggles to reach, a pulse

in the blood waiting to return. We dissolve into the rooms left behind, curtains 

rippling in the damp morning, furniture carefully crafted and left to 

rot. The current moves through walls, hunting, finds every bone that remembers

light. We are here between our lives and deaths, steady, the hum breathing

us back. We buried light here and called it seed, bore the water from our burial, 

and the soil forgot our names. On wet nights we can feel it growing, slick

beneath the floorboards, washing mud from our feet. When we sleep, we dream

of fields growing underwater, the heavy warmth of herds, tall rages of fire

rising through silt. Our doors will only open for the dead, forgotten. We know this

and we knock still. The sound moves different here; not echo, just hearts

beating. When something knocks back we tell ourselves it is the flood remembering

our shapes, the buildings we left learning to speak again. We listen each 

time it sings. When we dance we move through the thick light of our own drowning,

our bodies bending toward sound, lungs filled with rust and faith.  Around us

our water whispers, and every whisper carries the same promise of dimming light.