in the beginning, there was
the body. a you, finite enough
to reside, compact, in the confines
of space & time –

                                         but before there was
a you, there was the empty. that resides strong
in the body. a longing. a definition – can the body
exist without the Loneliness it counters

                                         & inhabits –

yes – the Loneliness grew strong within
you. made a world of you, dark
& vast as the beast that guards it;
became a copper-lunged thing;
a thing that sings without breathing,
strips the music from your little
bones; winged beast of metallic
claw & its anthem of shredding wire:
all the delicate machinery built
to contain you –

but in this reality, you are tame
& young. small. hollow
-boned, yet shatterproof in all
your body’s oblivious histories.

you cannot know the way you split galaxies
with a single breath; the universes
your hands can unlock in a single strike –
your history, a petty matchbox that ignites
with friction & hands, always the hands;

you are oblivious of the scientists
behind the screens, who claim
they built you; observing the specimen
of you – who built a tower in you,
the Lonely that makes you retreat
into yourself; who wrote the books
you could never find yourself in; books
that claim they saved you & built all
the delicate machinery & winged
beasts that strip you of flight & sweet
entropy;
                  wingless child –
                                the body is an infinity
                                you have yet to unravel –

in this reality, the story unwrites itself:
my lover un-ghosts me after i swallow
confession; the word bisexual unmakes
itself at home in me & i do not leave
my house; the clear liquid runs back
into its bottle like a river might; my mother
is not yet a mountain: the avalanche sweeps
up her body, unlearning & inhaling its anxieties;
she’s a good girl, a good southern girl:
the future grandchildren of my mother’s sentences
retreat to a hypothetical womb; her blessing, not
formed, hangs heavy in the thick air; my queerness
& self-loathing unwind, like DNA strands –

*

what of the body isn’t
an unbecoming –

*

i uncork a bottle of liquid galaxies
& tonight i am my mother’s child;
a boy i find pretty presses his tongue
against my front teeth & i forget
myself;                            i later find
my self                            alone beneath
the star                           light & this
is not                               the reality where
the boy loves himself back, nor is it
a story where the boy needn’t hate
himself to be worthy of touch –

*

tonight i am a thousand miles north
& i do not call my mother. i do not
smell the ethanol through her phone
-static; i do not hear the same apology
unwinding itself from her breath
like collapsing rosary beads; like allah
yerhama whispered at a wake; but i do
hear her say i love you, you have to know
i love you. & is that not its own funeral
quiet? her hands, kissing the bottle’s rim
submerging in the absence –

*      
   

say the sun forgave itself the inevitable
disappearance; say the ocean forgave
the moonlight’s lonesome pull –
say the fluid forgave its captor,
          history –
& even that can be its own shelter;
maybe in that reality, i would be,
instead, child of Thales: descendent
of salt & molecule; everything i touch,
spiraling into a galaxy of droplets,
           dissolving –