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Quiet, quiet, second children do not speak. The neck behind the neck of the primary tongue is less than nothing, less than scale, less than true (less than true, less than firstborn, but I never understand you) myself (when you) we (are like this, old snake.)
I pat my belly and you are within it, second daughter (second sister, second length of ropy emerald musculature) and your name is embossed on my innards like the brand on an iron kettle. There is one belly; there are eight heads (there are seven of us) soon, my (own, here in the dark) self in self (and have we yet learned to love the dark, to call it our mirror, to call it our flesh?) We are thrall to it, it serves us. And you are stoppered up in our body like a cork, and I am full of you all the moon long, and I too want to be called by my name, but your names, Kameko, your names crowd the (our) my mouth like krill.
(Have I not called you) us (by your name) as we are?
Call me Suffering, call me Fire, call me Gullet, call me, call me (what shall I call for, this city of dead girls and snake-guts, streets thrown over throat and thorax)
meat smoking in piles (yes, call you city of the dead, city of wraiths in wells, city of reptilian meat smoking in piles) second daughter, do not speak (second head, what shall I call you?)
Call me Kameko (call me) you (by my own name) for that is the nature of the filled throat. I still have them (us) inside me, all who have ever been eaten, pushing at my phosphorescent ribcage, blue and brown and green eyes blinking in aortal seizures (but they are your eyes now, we who float in the bitter broth of you, and do you not love our eyes? You said you loved them) the serpent-heart forgets, it is strange-gilled and fickle (as if a girl’s heart is air-hungry and constant under every possible sun) but the Belly does not forget (it bakes us) itself (like seven round cakes, and when we are finished, oh, we all have black serpent’s eyes) the coils heave and flail in the same sacred dance, helplessly repeating their susurrations in the sand. Flesh bears a thousand marks, a thousand fingernails, a thousand teeth. Every time it is the same time, and the body recalls all its usual acts of passion, all the expected responses, secretly weeping (crying) for all those it loved once but can never devour again. To endure passion is to burn and bleed the black of all voids.
(I was only a child; I didn’t know anything about devouring. You could have let me be.)
A child, yes, only a child, but I suffered for you.
(After my sister went into you, like a finger slipping into a ring, her husband, who was neither fat nor poor, returned to our house where the smell of frying eyes wafted from the pans so sweetly, and I saw his mouth water. He said that Kazuyo was gone, and he would not say, but he trembled, like a worm sighting a crow overhead. He demanded another girl to replace her—his loss would have to be answered, or he would call the magistrate and inform him that we had breached our contract. He was quite red in the face, and I thought, strangely, of the persimmons blowing into each other outside the house, flesh into flesh.)
Men are foolish. But they are beautiful, (he was neither beautiful nor old) and they suffer so. They do not understand the nature of the Mouth, which is (to ingest, to carry within,) to draw the Beloved inside. I am the sacred Mouth, my body, my heads only hold it, like a many-colored reliquary, eight together in one, cradling the wide lips which open to encompass the conflagrations of all possible skies. Give me a wine I can bite, a human child I can drink.
(Quiet, second head, do not speak. You have had these things, and they have had you.
And he had me. I stepped between my mother and the soup bubbling away, and offered myself with head bent low, offered myself to this man whose face was neither pocked nor greasy, and he pinched my arm for the muscle there, and said he would take me, and a pair of black chickens to make up the difference between a first and second daughter, a first and second choice.
But he insisted, you know. He was a good buyer, he knew how to tell if a horse is older than it seems by the hooves and the gums—he insisted on my virginity that very night, in case another serpent should befall his new wife, and he be left again having paid for nothing but a lump of blood and lymph left lying on the dry grass.
He asked me if I was born when the persimmons were thick on the branch, like my sister. Holding my arms over my small breasts as though they could protect me, I answered—no, I was born under the plum trees, when they were dark and pink with flowers. My mother was carrying the well water up to the house—and here he took my belt away—and the bar was so heavy on her shoulders, like a yoke—and here he took my robe—and she stumbled—her belly was so thick with me, thick as an uncut melon.) Yes, it is like that, when I am full of you, of your voice and your plum-laden scent, and the well-water rolling in you—(She fell forward onto her taut belly—and here he opened my legs with hands neither calloused nor small—and her thighs were wet with the water of the well and the water of her child—and here he pushed inside me with a grunt like a boar nosing for mushrooms in the loam—and she did not weep at all, but squatted in the garden and pushed her baby out among the quince and the mustard weed. My toes tangled in the raspberries, and I have never walked quite right—and here he stiffened and rolled off of me, and his hair smelled of oil and eyes.
“Soon you will carry my water, and give a child to my plums, and then you will be happy” he whispered, and fell asleep. He neither snored nor spoke in his dreams.)
Happiness (enlightenment—father says happiness is suffering, and enlightenment is a soup with no eyes) can only be reached when you have eaten the world, when you hold it inside you like a content child, rocking slowly on the drift-currents of your blood. He thought you would be content when you held another creature in you—he thought you were a Monster, like me, but you were nothing yet but a girl with wet linens. Still, it never works, it is never enough. I cannot rest until the Mouth is sated, yet it can never be full.
(He wore my maidenhead on his sleeve like a bright button, like a charm, to keep him safe when Kameko walked the road that Kazuyo walked. He called me his turtle-child, he called me his mare, and the sun was very high, like a pinprick in the air.)
Men believe that Beauty will keep them safe. That nothing beautiful is to be feared. And this is how they come to me, innocent, pure as ethyl alcohol, unknowing and sweet, dragging Beauty behind them. Their faith in the order of Man and Monster is profound. They never expect me (us) to be beautiful, never expect the colors of my (our) flesh, never expect that Beauty calls to Beauty, never know how the sheen of your hair calls to me. (How the sheen of Kazuyo beaming from your long, swan-bright neck like a lantern lit only for me would propel me into your stunted, clawed arms.) And under the lights of my skin they gasp, their minds blown clear as glass, in rapture, in (passion.) They lust (for me, for the snake, for the thing we make together in the dark?) with a clean and singing strength—and lust, like passion, erases all but itself, imprints only its own image on the sweat-kissed eyelid, repeated like the refracted light of a star. Their stars become my eyes, boiling white and deep.
His eyes were full of sons, and you were so beautiful, limping behind him.
And when you were empty of all but the sight of me, (but the sight of my sister, laughing behind your eyes which had neither pupils nor irises), we began our too-brief courtship, under the high, wild cries of the migrating terns.
(Like nested dolls we are, the snake and the maiden and the ninth daughter floating in me, gills like crystal, eyes without color, awash in the salt-soup of my) our (body, tiny as a needle, dreaming. It is not unlike a serpent, all Mouth and Belly, suckling at the womb-walls of this long throat, woman choked with woman choked with woman, and I) if there is an I (un-maidened and un-mothered, and where are the plum-trees who would hear my daughter’s first cry?)
It is all one flesh, that monstrous swell, curve of globe beneath the Skin, heaving and tossing with an ecstasy that has taste and smell—quince and mustard and rotted persimmons.
III
ONOGORO
This is how it was in the beginning of the world: a churning sea, and no earth, and a great bridge hung in the world: a churning sea, and jellyfish macerating themselves into starry foam on the wave-tips. In the beginning of the beginning of the beginning, of the tips of the beginning of the waves. This is how it was pillared in black, and it was so black, and its suspensors were strung with light like mala beads, and jellyfish crushed themselves into raw foam on the tips of the world. A bridge hung on the tips of the waves. This is how the bridge was pillared in the beginning of the world: on clouds, and mist, and the depthless sea.
It was all confused, then, the air and the saltsea, and the darkness.
In nothing, some part of nothing seemed to flow into a space that was her and a space that was him, and his eyes on the undulate sea were as the hand of her flesh on the glittering suspensors, at once through the void, the void seemed to flow into her, and in the briefest beginning of the beginning of moments, the shadows were perfumed.
Izanami and Izanagi opened their eyes on the bridge that spanned heaven, and the feet of Izanami on the floor of the jeweled bri
dge were strong and pale. Her hair was as black as the nothing, and the void seemed still to cling to her, into her and out of her and into her and out of her. The eyes of Izanagi, in the days before flame, were the brightest objects of all objects in the span of space. The dusk sat on his shoulder blades like clothes, and he said nothing, and she said nothing, and they were the first of all things in the world.
Steam rose from their shadows.
