to discover pleasure,
to utter sounds,
floats up and away like
the Green Moths
haunting my Mud
Hut, throbbing
softly under strobing lights.
It is true,
surgeons have no faces.
In the aftermath,
I am a
a gutted fish
robbed of glut
with swollen insides
and a laborer’s breath.
My fingers grub around for memory
but the child is not here.
Little pantomime,
spinning sufi
fetal emperor, unfolding your
soft digits, fanning
the flumes of your almost-gone gills,
I am your almost-mother.
My eyes marble and flatten,
Magnolia blossoms fall
from my thighs.
