Depth: 8,178 metres.
Pressure: eight hundred times the air.
A place without dawn,
where light has never leaned.

Temperature steady as grief.
Sound moves as a thief through basalt corridors.
The sea floor expands
with the slow tectonic breath of the world.

There, a body,
soft as the thought of mercy,
spine dissolving into translucence,
eyes wide though no sun exists.

The snailfish drifts, ethereal,
its skin a blur between presence and surrender.
It does not resist the weight,
it becomes the weight,
and lives.

Pressure reigns in the kingdom of quiet.
Every motion is a psalm,
every current an answer
to the gravity of creation.

Beneath the continents’ hollowing bones,
life exalts,
a glass prayer
rising through perpetual midnight.