INCHWORM—delicate earth finger, still foolish? Yes. Deep February soil, cold and forever, seeps into heavy-needled fingers, it is headed the inchworm’s way. Slick-headed baby empties its canopy, sapped in vomit on its journey to the bottom of lakes, it seeks below. We watch it: the body eat the light, sweet bark becomes turned over, scraped from the feet of birds, who no longer eat fish. Their leftovers given to the gods of snow fallen lakes, the submerged mudskipper. Watching slow legs scramble in their walk, the ice-sky falls and so does the light, a comet tail of hair is lassoed on arthropodin corpses. Do we know where the light goes? —No. The cold front is stuffed in the soft gut, violently—to satiate hungry organs and eyeless faces, with napkins sewn of algae and bone. POSTPARTUM GROCERY SHOPPINGI buy a head of butter lettuce. I sit at my kitchen table, dissecting leaf from bulbous and velvet stem. I shove loose heads into my mouth, the farther in I go, the less alive it all seems. There is a carcass on a leaf, a bug. He ate like a king in a prison, his jailer a plastic tub. I eat him too. The lettuce has circular abysses as I move towards its center, the functional holes provide airway for my tongue that is gripping soft green bone like paint thinner, hoping to shrink its body, consuming its desiccated calcium. I tuck myself into the refrigerator, next to mason jars of pickled children’s breath. Outside the moon glares in to touch my arms, I want to whisk its nocturnal yolk into my gullet, I hope to devour my son back into my ribs, his vast body emptied like jellyfish bile on the beach where his father proposed to me. I wish I could have said no, if only to protect name-filled eggs inside me—useless. ✱✱✱
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