Vernix Clouds Under a Cervical Sky

Silken webs she wove from the threads of spit that dripped from out of her. Seeping spermatic tangle for me to find my home within. There with(in) the devouring mother, she of six or seven legs, one mutilated half torn from the body from some bitter struggle or another, opening my guts already in sweating anticipation for her fangs. She who would hold my head beneath the bathwater, who would sip my screams from the bubbles before they could burst, she wears a robe spun of stormclouds, perfumed by a balm of malfeasance, a haze which floats and flits about her many eyes encrusting her face like sordid gems and swirling like the wheels in Ezekiel’s burning vision.

My blood speaks its salient language…salience or silence—I cannot remember which—and hums within my veins. These sewers which flow within me; their filth and their waters are yours if you would only carve me open, I say, but she shouts in salves of thunder and I am quiet. Silent my blood shall be, no longer salient (whatever this word may mean; I have forgotten in my distress, because how smooth one slides into the other: silence and salience, how I would like for these to mean the same; a lexical hole protruding, the sharpened point of the intervals between speech soliciting outward, silence manifest into something physical, like ideographic holes torn into the fabric spread of sky where I would imagine words would be if written by the nib of God’s stylet with which He engraves upon the worldly slate His spells of…but breath falls short of me here), and outside of this aside I snap back to myself, recollecting my distress fumbled like bits of broken glass about the ground.

To put it plainly I would like to kiss this woman, to be bitten by this woman; now, quickly, so as to be done with it. So afraid of what comes next, so afraid of all that has come before; a fear of life itself, and I know, I know because I see it, I read it, there! etched in the lines of her lips like calligraphic strokes about a scroll: Your distance spreads the skies between your eyes, and could we dare to join them together, to bring about or together our apocalypse, one’s pair upon the other’s; tearing the fat of the tissue like blades across the waxed flesh of infants?

The angels with their trumpets, the angels with their bowls; they spill and sound their wrath to spell the end of this first end, and I swiftly shift away like a letter torn from the envelope of this body and I am read. Like language I am taken in, seeped into her stomach like the petulant child who cries to call out for God as he is all awash in flames; swimming in this paradise of flowing clouds of amnion, rank and vulgar fluids, clotted rivers of blood perfumed of iron ore and ochre.

I am swallowing her in turn, or what of her insides are for me the skies, because I wish to be her world; she who has taken me in, I will breach the bounds of her body to make of her flesh a cosmos; her every ovum a star, the blood she will drain in my redelivery the water of the oceans; this, the New Jerusalem, New Heaven, the fertile fields of this natal Heaven crashing down upon the earth.

And how I will swim within every sea—stomach down, breast stroke—with mouth open, the fluids of your fertility flowing through me, and the memory of your murder, the gift of death I gave to immortalize you as the All which holds all of this wonderful Everything within it. Because you murdered me. Because I begged this much of you, remember? tearing this death from the sharp of your own fangs like spit when I was starved. But you knew this was your gift to give, and yours to receive in turn.

I wish for you to die, you told me. Only because I love you so much, because I know of no gift more prodigious than this. And I said the same for you, and my throat I promised as sheath for your blades always; offering my skull for your pointed feet, with the pavement for my bed as you stomp some song or lullaby to send me off to sleep. And what I asked of you, all I ask of you, is to allow me the pleasure of stringing your veins like streamers across the sky, from one end of endless space to another, to commemorate your death with the life which you have granted to everything. This death which you have given me.

A death as many deaths given from as many births—as man and man and men; all of these a dead end, every male life lived a failed reality. Would that I have been born as you—you who seek to devour me, so that, perhaps with the lips of my own mouth, I might meet or touch myself as if in a kiss to devour my own body and give birth to myself thereby. Mothering myself as daughter, as perhaps who I should have always been, who at times I feel I long to be because my lungs are flooded with flames of envy when I see you, and those like you, knowing I might or could have been you before you, that I would like to be you in your place inside of this body which would feel more home than my own.

To dip the nib in red ochre of these fluids that are mine, whose pangs and suffering would torment with the convulsions of life; life since I would be thrown near to the dregs of death, draining here and again a life that might have could have been (and would that it could even be yours so that I might this time be your mother, and would that it could even be myself so I could love myself as mother-child, and give to you a sister in me, and would that it have been me from your own womb so you could raise me as your own starlet fallen from the iron-amnion sky).

But now I’ve lost track and fumbled my womanway. Now what if as woman I could continue? What if with woman’s step I could go on? What if with woman’s words I could speak to you even now on the brighter side of your murder, finding a way to hold you, or for you to hold me, holding one another as women, as lovers, the two of us radiant as crystal, glimmering as the very jewel of Lesbos; so much like a sapphire we would shine, utterly Sapphic in our splendor. To watch as the waves of Greece felled the other states that are not ours, that belong to them, flattening the heights of Mount Athos and drowning those who sought truth in the world of words.