First published in Blue Marble Review.
Michigan. The palmist cherries read my lifeline with their blood, flowing like the red sea through the
geometric map of skin. The cherries beat my mouth with warmth taken from the sun.
They tell me “you will be born again soon.”
We kiss, I drag them across my mouth for lipstick and beauty.
I pucker my lips, wait to be held in a grip, a fist, a witch trial, a public execution. I hold myself upside
down until my head conjoins with them at the stem.
I sink deep, and find the dust of my bodies.
Laid like shipwrecks—baby, child,
until I become a girl that flips through the
anatomy books; common ancestor to man.
The hunched walk of wanderlust.
A woman whose breasts are clad black and white
and the paper man she makes love to when no one is watching the page.
She tells me, “I will be you someday,”
and I was. To evolve. You must wear the body.
Coloured purple, blue, ghost, ornamental.
It will crack like uncharted whale skeletons at the sea’s bottom. The core. The tail is boneless. Bloodless. I
wonder if this is what the soul is. I knew it when I lay myself next to a headless tree, and decided that it
looked like me. Bioluminescence will flow through the rib cage that the child is locked behind.
The senses that are quiet.
I decided I wasn’t pitless when I saw the cherry bare,
and wiped my finger across chalk boards to take the pigmented writings with me;
numbers, the questions, the answers. A history breaks into my dna.
I have wanted to do the same with these dust-bodies.
Their teeth left to me like forebears; crowning, too small, like an ancient human’s skull,
can’t be put back and incubated in my swollen soft tissue—the many wombs of a mouth.
I paint my bodies and their hands and feet turn out vestigial.
How could I not scream and tell them that, “we are constantly dying.”