Years ago, they drove a spear of blackened wood
through the base of my spine, and
when the bleeding stopped
my skin grew around it,
like bark around an axe
left buried in a tree
it couldn’t kill.
Why does a tree keep
reaching towards the sun—
doesn’t it know any other way?
Now I am a prayer to the earth,
laid upon the burial mound,
sacrum planted deep
in rich, dark mulch.
Many-legged monsters
turning, churning the seeds in
my swollen belly full of forest floor.
So full I can taste the dirt.
I wake up as my bones break down,
as the wheel of life turns
ceaselessly,
order and chaos
chasing each others’ tails.
Vines and flowers and spiders
climb the trellis of my spine;
the sky waters me with its tears.
What’s left of this life is a sprout
waiting to grow into something
it doesn’t know yet.
Some other heart beats
at the base of my spine.
I’m home to a creature
warm, with a fast pulse
and a wet nose.
Fur slick with decay, it
channels up through my guts,
my lungs, pushing a clump of flesh
past my throat and I swallow
my heart clenched in my mouth,
bleeding salt down my chin.
A few tears.
A final, joyful rush
of chemical brainsoup
spilling from my lips.
What happened in between
one beginning and the next?
This life, I’ve been mostly asleep,
listening to someone else’s dream
through the wall.
In the next, I’ll be
someone else.
I was always becoming something—
my shadow bleeding into darkness,
becoming-monstrous, becoming-mother,
my smile becoming light, becoming-laughter,
becoming a child’s hand in my own.
Becoming a story someone tells.
Letting a song sing me, arch my back.
Becoming-stars, becoming-gravity,
becoming-other.
My voice becoming your voice,
my eyes filling with your tears.
I become your hands on my face as
I become someone who could love this world.
Unwind these stories, unwind this skin.
Me unfurled: spread-eagle,
flayed open by rain and wind,
palms facing up towards the sun.
Raw nerves exposed like stripped wire
so that even the gentlest breeze
could pluck my strings
and make me sing.
This brain was laid down
a long time ago, patterns
like sediments of earth.
Wind through an empty skull.
A tangle of roots at my throat.
It speaks its final commandment. It says—
Dreamer, I’m telling you,
you’ve got to slip your skin.
Desert this body in revolt.
Escape in the pause between
two syllables of a word
and let your self dissolve in
breath,
cloud, a swirl of petals
on the wind.
© 2020 Rita Chen
