b * o * d * y

I will sew our bodies into this truth. It will have the force of our collective lungs, be able to suck in islands and highways on its inhale. It will blow over all of our steroid-walled hearts like they were rice-paper. This truth that will hold seventy billion pints of blood in its beliefs in its thoughts--enough to feed all our hungry babies.  And I will stitch us all in with the undulated string of the double helix. to do this, I will have to shrink my hands until they are plankton or the whale’s baleen that violins them.

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What if our lives could be cut open by taking a knife to them. Our skin, this thin membrane of cells and fur is such a precarious thing, and yet it holds in our secrets our intestines all of our pain twisted up into train tracks. If we cut ourselves we bleed, we remember again how futile it is to march on for happiness. What if we could do the same to our jobs or our customs, just cut them open and humiliate them.

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For example, what is after sea. What comes after the copious blue? The blue that licks us clean with its wash, its salt, it’s full spiny breath? What comes after it has decided to leave? Will we learn to let red dust or oil clean off our old habits?

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I wish our bodies were like the bodies of words—their bodies are ships with hard exteriors but clear clean accessibility. You can stick your hand down a word’s tidy throat and pluck some of her memory or even place an old keepsake inside her stomach. Our bodies are like a stirred up bay after rain, the movement, the waviness of them keeps them from ever giving much shelter to another. We cannot be stuffed the way a word can be stuffed. We cannot bunker the way we do in our earth’s caves.  If I could I would stretch my mouth and windpipe, clean up the luke slime (which makes the body such an unpleasant hotel) and let you take or leave a gift.