Civitas

Acts of love have

material effects. For a woman

tending the sacred fire, these include

the risk of becoming

an extinguisher

of flames essential

to civic life. It is a burden

to put out

what others hold as central

to faith in coherence. Acts of faith

have material effects — a Vestal

Virgin touched by encounter

must be buried alive,

a beautiful metaphor

for shame itself, which squirms

even under all that dirt. Thus, the dead

learn too late

that devotion should be

unidirectional, a straight line

from here to suffocation. Love must not

bleed at the edges, must not meet

others in the banal spaces

of civic life. It is a burden

to personify. If Vesta’s hearth is the site

of the sacred, its material effects

are destruction: burning, consumption,

constant hunger

for more wood. Acts

of destruction have

fantasmatic effects. For a body

surviving encounter, these include

civic life, shame;

the risk of being

a proxy — tender

of the hearth belonging

to the public, by way

of the goddess, who embodies a dream

of faith in coherence. Material effects

extinguish themselves, eventually,

as when a woman

touched in the correct way

undoes the burden

of love and puts out, taking

the goddamn city in and under.