16. HOW WILL YOU / HAVE YOU PREPARE(D) FOR YOUR DEATH?
Sometimes a man says something to a woman, and after that she knows she is incapable of giving birth to something. That would live.
For days, I wrote about a woman whose lungs were filled with water. I made, instead, the body of the man standing at the edge of the river. Matted lashes. Flush irises. He has my eyes. The last time I saw him, I kissed his chest, through his shirt. Silk. Violet. And that was before I knew what my life would be like, without him. It was before the phone rang, and I did not reply, not even a year later, on the corner, when someone asked me if I wanted milk or sugar.
Beneath ideas: the tightness in the chest at the beginning of a long sentence, the fuschia spikes of closed eyelids, dismembered kisses, arbitrary thirsts. Milk. Something sweet. Please.
~
38. WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF YOUR BODY?
The feeling of my body. I feel like the man who is making a pathway through a forest of thorns. He wants to reach a place that does not exist until he touches it with his mouth.
She has been sleeping for a long time. Brown crystals, like sugar, in the corners of her eyes. Her dreaming saliva has dried on her cheek, where it drizzled from her mouth. There are sparrows singing in the tree outside her window. People are shouting and embracing, as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. Then they remember.
When they open the door, he. Has sunk his nails. Into her hip. She is pressing. Her hand against. Her eye. Smearing it. Her hand. Against the wall.
They tear the man out of her body.
I am thinking of the man, how he reminds me of Christ: the bloody one; the lover who is torn from his beloved; the stranger who brings the gift of awakening, but who is executed at dawn; the exhausted traveler.
~
39. HOW WILL YOU LIVE NOW?
They travel for days. Sometimes it rains abruptly. Silver flashes. The girl looks for eyes in the puddles after these sudden storms. She finds them: handfuls of monsoon frogs. Tiny. Bright green, with bronze brown flecks. She shows them to her grandfather. “Can we take them home?” No.
When she is grown, she realizes that she has forgotten everything. How to live without explanations. How to travel light. How to let the earth go. How skin can see.
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