My Sister I am writing to you for the very last time. -Marie Antoinette I cannot repeate from my own invention of what I am, that I am not myself and therein more, through everything I trust to leave, in this heart-wrenching condemned-minded promise but leaving, I am calm, as one always is when one's conscience is clear, the sky's monarchy opening up above me as evidence, and if my body be this fruited apology to their treason, how easy it is to speak and not be understood, how easy a confession to being alive, hard love, how easy for all of us. Please, keep this memory and my children close to you, embrace this detour and reason so I have not squandered my inaugural north, nor opposed, even against my own inevitable ghost-face, the rocky coastline that returns our language to us and to its better ground, better hour than what it was, dear one to my sadness, such pretense that exhausts the immortal, and we are not without failing omnipotence in our affair of numbers, still together, so forgive me, my powerlessness, after me, to know you have received this. ELENA KARINA BYRNE