THREADCOUNT

Constellation of Moons

She could break my spine when I push her into florescent light, but I only think about death when it’s over. I know I will fuck up these white sheets, the years between five and sixteen, somewhere the last beluga whale caught in a net. Each breath is a step. Each swallow a growing space between our skin.

In a cave filled with stones there are tentacles stitching grains of life into organic chandeliers, each bead an encapsulated breath. The mother fans air into salt sea. Her dainty suction cups a constellation of moons, ocean planets rotating around 56,000 stars waiting to collide with the sun.

Five months with no food and 56,000 unkissable stars. Pink skin sallows into pewter rings forced into a protective swing. Picture the mother under a ceiling of translucent cocoons. Picture them swelling at the tip, her children emerging as falling snow. When she blows them through the cave and the stones, picture her 3 hearts in the shape of Polaris, bursting in mantle clouds.

When she blows them all away, the mother dies. I want to pull her to the surface and breathe into her beak. To capture the little mantles in cuped palms and give them back to her, one by one. I want her to feel their suctioned limbs, imagine their small bodies hugged against sand.

Tell me you wanted to keep them.

I want to unfeel the separation of us. I want to unknow the mortality of stars. How the night sky is life and death trapped in finite waves of light. I want to hold her under the sheets, let the placental stains harden and dry into our own infinite, touchable suns.

I can’t admit that it’s too much. I have cracked and spilled into oceans of unnamable guilt. Where would we be if not mothering our bodies into tired open wounds? And of course I will die a thousand times, in a thousand ways. Each toddled step a practice in letting go.